[CMake] Obtaining dependencies of static libraries

[Robert Dailey]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 3:36 AM, Mike Arthur <mike at mikearthur.co.uk> wrote:

> On Thursday 22 January 2009 23:26:47 Robert Dailey wrote:
> > With all do respect, why does it matter? Yes, in the generated target
> > dependencies are handled for me but when I call get_target_property()
> with
> > LINK_INTERFACE_LIBRARIES it only includes the dependencies I specific for
> > only that executable target, it does not provide me the transitive
> > dependencies. This is a problem for me.
>
> It matters because:
> a) You're asking for help on a list of mostly volunteers so sometimes we
> ask
> why you're doing something so we can direct you if you've just missed
> something in CMake.
> b) You may have uncovered a bug in CMake and we'd like to help make CMake
> better than it is.


Most of the time it is extremely difficult or impossible to express my tone
of voice through text. I did not mean for my initial question to sound rude,
but if it seemed that way I do apologize. I'm used to the case where people
ask "Why are you doing that in the first place" and when I respond they
usually retaliate with rude remarks, like "You're doing that completely
wrong and it's evil". So I make every effort to avoid such questions because
of this.

In any case, the reason why I'm doing this is rather complicated and I could
spend a few paragraphs explaining it. However if you are really interested
in knowing I don't mind explaining:

For my specific project, I keep all of my third party dependencies versioned
with the source code. So I may have a directory called "project/source",
that contains all of my source code, and a directory named
"project/third_party" which contains various third party libraries. Using
the Boost library as an example on the Windows platform, we would have
import libraries located here:

"project/third_party/boost/libs/<lib files here>"

In the same directory that the import libraries (LIB) files are located in,
we also have the shared library files (DLL). We group them like this because
we want CMake to be able to get a list of import library dependencies and
simply replace the extension with DLL in order to find the corresponding
shared library so that we may copy those DLL files to the binary output
directory, which would be "CMAKE_BINARY_DIR/bin/<configuration>".

However, this situation gets a little more complex. Suppose I have 3
projects: A, B, and C. Projects A and B are defined as static library
projects in CMake and both A and B have had target_link_libraries() called
on them to place dependencies on various boost import libraries. Project C
is an executable project and it has had the following called on it:

target_link_libraries( C A B <more boost libraries> )

Since project C now links against A and B, we need to ensure that the
executable generated by building project C is able to find the DLL files
required by projects A, B, and C itself. Because of this, I need to be able
to "recursively" find all of the import library dependencies for project C
(Which if done correctly would provide a list of library dependencies of A
and B as well).

Once I have this "flattened" list of dependencies, I replace all the *.LIB
extensions with *.DLL (On windows) and copy those DLL files to the location
of the executable!

Because this problem is so complex, I avoided explaining it to begin with to
save some trouble.
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