How to install the most current version

Usage
2

Since we only provide latest version of packages for Ubuntu (see https://apt.kitware.com/), you have the following options:

  1. Download the pre-build binaries into ~/software directory, and create symlinks to ~/bin

    mkdir ~/software
cd ~/software
CMAKE_VERSION=3.17.3
CMAKE_ROOT=cmake-${CMAKE_VERSION}-Linux-x86_64
url=https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v${CMAKE_VERSION}/${CMAKE_ROOT}.tar.gz
curl -# -LO $url
tar -xzvf ${CMAKE_ROOT}.tar.gz
rm -f ${CMAKE_ROOT}.tar.gz

for prog in cmake ccmake ctest cpack cmake-gui; do
  ln -s ~/software/${CMAKE_ROOT}/bin/${prog} ~/bin/${prog}
done

  2. Create a python virtual env and pip install cmake

    Caveat: this approach do not provide cmake-gui and ccmake

    env_dir=~/software/cmake-latest-venv
python -m venv ${env_dir}
${env_dir}/bin/python -m pip install cmake

for prog in cmake ctest cpack; do
  ln -s ${env_dir}/${prog} ~/bin/${prog}
done

    Then, each time you would like to update cmake, you could simply run

    ~/software/cmake-latest-venv/bin/python -m pip install --upgrade cmake

    Alternatively, you could create one virtual env directory per version.