[CMake] problems running a windows build exectuable

[Philip Lowman]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Dominik Szczerba <dominik at itis.ethz.ch>wrote:

> When debugging a MSVC target I get a complaint about missing DLL's. Of
> course if I 1) copy all required DLL's to the system folder, or 2) copy
> the exe along with all the DLL's to one separate folder - all works. But
> it's an obvious hassle. How can I run my executables in-place like on
> linux where the lib paths are known (thanks to the linker flags)? Have I
> forgotten anything in the cmake input?


The commands below will cause all of your generated DLLs & EXEs to be dumped
into a single folder called "bin" in your toplevel directory unless you're
using VS in which case by default it will be bin/Debug/* or bin/Release/*
etc.  Import libraries static or shared will get dumped in a "lib" folder.
If you're using CMake with a WIN32 project that creates DLLs, you pretty
much have to set these variables IMHO for things to be usable.

set(CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/bin)
set(CMAKE_ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/lib)
set(CMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_BIINARY_DIR}/bin)

See...
http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/cmake2.6docs.html#prop_tgt:RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/cmake2.6docs.html#prop_tgt:ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/cmake2.6docs.html#prop_tgt:LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY

===

Also as an aside in case you haven't come across it yet, I highly recommend
a tool called Dependency Walker for investigating DLL dependencies.

===

To answer your other question, one technique you can use is called Delay
Loaded DLLs (/DELAYLOAD).  I have used it before on a limited basis with
some success although it is a bit finicky to setup error handling for it.
It can be made to work if you know exactly where a DLL is on the hard
drive/drives but that is generally a guess at best so you might not be able
to rely on it.  It might be worth a look though.

I think generally people use the "copy all DLLs to one folder" approach
unless you're dealing with a well maintained system provided shared library
like DirectX.  One of the downsides to Windows & DLL hell :(


-- 
Philip Lowman
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