[cmake-developers] Using cmake pkg-config-like in non-cmake builds

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Monday 22 November 2010, Brad King wrote:
> On 11/22/2010 03:55 PM, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > I have a slightly different idea: instead of having cmake generate
> > pc-files, modify/extend cmake so that it can be used similar to
> > pkg-config by projects which don't use cmake as their buildsystem.
>
> Interesting.
>
> > It already somewhat works:
> > $ cmake -DMODE=COMPILE -DCOMPILER_ID=GNU -DPACKAGE=PNG -P
> > cmake-config.cmake -I/usr/include -I/usr/include
> >
> >  $ cmake -DMODE=LINK -DCOMPILER_ID=GNU -DPACKAGE=PNG -P
> > cmake-config.cmake /usr/lib/libpng.so /usr/lib/libz.so
> >
> > Do you think this makes sense ?
>
> Yes.  It might be hard to do in non-toy cases though.
>
> > Current issues:
> > * the output goes to stderr instead stdout
> > * the output has line breaks
> > * actual problem: currently it's not possible to use commands which deal
> > with targets in script-mode (I disabled that in 2007 since at least back
> > then it didn't make sense). This means that find-modules which use
> > try_compile() internally fail, and also those which create imported
> > targets.
>
> Consider implementing the outer-most script in bash (or plain bourne
> shell). Internally it can run "cmake" on a test project that prints
> information during its configuration but never builds.  Then you can use
> sed to parse out the results.

Good idea.

> > Do you think it is worth to put some effort into this ?
>
> I'm not going to spend time on it but I can review what others produce.

Ok :-)

Alex