I just ran into a problem with with cmake hanging when trying to create my Visual Studio solution files for Houdini 20.5.332. It turns out that if you happen to have a DSO compiled somewhere in your Houdini search paths that is incompatible binary-wise with the houdini that you are running cmake for, it will hang with no error or seeming reason. (In my case I had accidently compiled one using the v143 toolset rather than v142 and it was sat in my Documents\houdini20.5\dso folder).

It gets triggered from the houdini_get_default_install_dir function in the cmake process which executes hython.exe. If you go to the houdini command prompt (hcmd.exe) and run hython.exe, you will get a nice popup saying "couldn't load xxx incompatible compiler versions" (equally if you have run Houdini itself you will get the same error message) but if you run cmake directly without realising, it hangs - I assume the popup is somehow hidden but execution stalled waiting on it to be dismissed.

The solution is to delete/move the DSO dll's that are incompatible and then running cmake again, but it would be very, very useful to have houdini/hython handle this gracefully and not hang. Must have lost a couple of days on this as I thought it was due to a Visual Studio update, but it wasn't! Just wanted to post these here in case anyone else comes across it.

- Simon.