sub directory not using submodule

[NoPlanNomad]

Feature category

• enhancement - documentation

The problem
the cmake sub directory documentation tells developers to clone the subject.
but might be better to advice them to use a git submodule

The solution I'd like
advice to use git submodule with the following command
git submodule add https://github.com/alandefreitas/matplotplusplus/ <submodule directory location>

[alandefreitas]

but might be better to advice them to use a git submodule

I don't think there's much consensus on that at this point.

The best advice could be to not do that at all or describe the requirements properly in a package manager manifest format. But then we miss this form of integration some people might want or end up with conflicts between package managers.

I think the best and smallest improvement on top of that would be FetchContent, which is already supported and documented. But I think the point of that example is to show that add_subdirectory works, regardless of how the directory got there.