[CMake] Installing Visual Studio PDB files with CMake

[David Cole]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 9:32 AM, Stephen Torri <stephen.torri at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/4/11, Michael Hertling <mhertling at online.de> wrote:
>>
>> The problem is that PDB files are usually generated next to their binary
>> in a configuration-specific directory which can not be accessed smoothly
>> by INSTALL(FILES ...). However, you can use a POST_BUILD custom command
>> in conjunction with generator expressions to copy the PDB files to a
>> well-known location where INSTALL(FILES ...) will find them, e.g.:
>>
>> ADD_EXECUTABLE(main ...)
>> ADD_CUSTOM_COMMAND(TARGET main POST_BUILD
>>     COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E copy_if_different
>>         $<TARGET_FILE_DIR:main>/main.pdb
>>         ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/main.pdb)
>> INSTALL(FILES ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/main.pdb DESTINATION ...)
>>
>> Possibly, you might need to use a convenient CMake script or the
>> like instead of copy_if_different to account for missing PDB
>> files in non-debug configurations.
>>
>> While this should work quite well, it would be nice if INSTALL()
>> has an idea of generator expressions, too, so it can find non-
>> target files residing in configuration-specific locations.
>> Perhaps, that's worth a feature request?
>
> I have finally gotten time to address this problem. In the top
> CMakeLists.txt file I have set the CMAKE_ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY,
> CMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY and CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY.
> Therefore when I do a debug build within Visual Studio 2008 the DLLs,
> PDBs and other files are placed in the appropriate directory. In this
> case ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin/{CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE}. So for Debug I see
> the files in ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/bin/Debug.
>
> So I don't need to specifically use the post build script you provided. What I
> am stuck on is the INSTALL command. When I do I find that cpack will
> expect the PDB file to exist for any build.
>
> IF(MSVC)
>  INSTALL ( FILES ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin/Debug/file.pdb DIRECTORY lib )
> ENDIF(MSVC)
>
> As it is written that is true. I am not sure how to make an INSTALL
> command to only install the PDB files if the build type equals DEBUG.
> At present running 'cpack' without any arguments tries to find the PDB
> files. I thought that if I had CONFIGURATIONS set to Debug it would
> not try to install the PDBs since cpack defaults to the RELEASE build.
> What I got was an error from cpack that said it could not find a PDB
> file. I changed the above to read:
>
> IF(MSVC)
>  INSTALL ( FILES ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin/Debug/file.pdb DIRECTORY
> lib CONFIGURATIONS Debug )
> ENDIF(MSVC)
>
> Is this the correct way to restrict the PDB files to only be installed
> if someone does "cpack -C Debug"?
>
> Stephen
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I would expect what you have at the end should work:

IF(MSVC)
  INSTALL ( FILES ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/Bin/Debug/file.pdb
    DIRECTORY lib
    CONFIGURATIONS Debug
    )
ENDIF(MSVC)

If there's some problem with this install rule, please let us know.