[CMake] INSTALL(EXPORT) does not honor LINK_INTERFACE_LIBRARIES?

[Michael Hertling]

On 03/30/2011 02:02 PM, Rolf Eike Beer wrote:

>> However, I still don't understand the relation of that transitive
>> linking and its avoidance, respectively, to your initial complaint
>> about CMake's error message due to the missing library in another
>> library's export set. Unless I'm mistaken, you've a shared library
>> target "publiclib" which is linked explicitly against another target
>> "privatelib" via TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES().
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> This means you can't place
>> publiclib in an export set without privatelib since the former could
>> not be set up properly w.r.t. its diverse IMPORTED properties if the
>> latter is not installed, too, i.e. INSTALL(EXPORT) could not generate
>> a valid export file.
> 
> Yes, and that's basically the problem I have.
> 
> Ok, I went and put every thing in the same export set. Which itself is a
> bit weird as I now have to INSTALL static libraries that were linked by
> the shared ones only to be able to specify that they are in the export
> set. And at the end all those libraries of course show up in the export.
> And I still see IMPORTED_LINK_DEPENDENT_LIBRARIES_DEBUG of the library
> that this is all about set to it's dependencies.

W.r.t. *static* libraries, that's not necessary: If a shared library is
linked against a static one and the former prevents transitive linking
for the latter by setting LINK_INTERRFACE_LIBRARIES appropriately, the
static library does not need to be put in the shared one's export set:

CMAKE_MINIMUM_REQUIRED(VERSION 2.8 FATAL_ERROR)
PROJECT(PRIVATE C)
SET(CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE ON)
FILE(WRITE ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/f.c "void f(void){}\n")
ADD_LIBRARY(f STATIC f.c)
FILE(WRITE ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/g.c "void g(void){f();}\n")
ADD_LIBRARY(g SHARED g.c)
TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES(g f)
SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES(g PROPERTIES LINK_INTERFACE_LIBRARIES "")
INSTALL(TARGETS g EXPORT public LIBRARY DESTINATION lib)
INSTALL(EXPORT public DESTINATION share)

In the export file, the static f isn't mentioned at all, and that's
perfect. Without LINK_INTERFACE_LIBRARIES set or with a *shared* f,
this does not work, of course.

Regards,

Michael