[CMake] Cannot prevent import library from being created with VS generator

[J. Caleb Wherry]

I’m also interested in this.

Side note 1: Things like this eventually lead me to have a post process (a
python script) on all my VS project files to “fix” any issues like this. If
I can’t figure out a way to do something specific in a VS project, I just
add it to my post process until I eventually have time to dig in and figure
it out. For this specific issue, I just match a regex for the line and
remove it. I know this shouldn’t be neccessary but sometimes I just don’t
have the time to figure out a specific generator problem.

Side note 2: I also used this process at one point to make relocatable VS
solutions/projects. It worked quite well and is a quick way to get around
short comings in how CMake creates VS artifacts.

-Caleb

On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 6:49 PM Jason Heeris <jason.heeris at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm using CMake 3.12-rc1 on Windows 10. I have the following
> `CMakeLists.txt`:
>
> cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.8)
> project(cmake_test)
> unset(CMAKE_IMPORT_LIBRARY_SUFFIX)
> add_library(main MODULE "main.c")
>
> The generator is Visual Studio 15 2017.
>
> I would like to suppress the "/IMPLIB" argument created for the "main"
> library. In my real project, I have static and shared libraries named the
> same. This works fine, because they have different extensions (lib vs dll),
> but a problem arises when the linker tries to create an import library for
> "something.dll" named "something.lib", while also trying to link against a
> static library named "something.lib".
>
> The import library is not needed though; in CMake terminology the DLL is a
> "module" ie. loaded via DllOpen(). The documentation suggested that calling
> "add_library()" with "MODULE" was what I needed here. Unfortunately the
> resulting VS project still contains an import library flag for the linker.
>
> A Stackoverflow answer[1] suggested unsetting
> "CMAKE_IMPORT_LIBRARY_SUFFIX" because the source indicates[2] this will
> stop the flag from appearing. But all this seems to do is drop the filename
> from the generated project; it still contains this now-incorrect flag that
> references a directory instead of a full path:
>
> <ImportLibrary>C:/Users/heerij/Code/cmake-ex-2/build/Debug/</ImportLibrary>
>
> How do I prevent the import library creation?
>
> - Jason
>
>   [1]
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34575066/how-to-prevent-cmake-from-issuing-implib
>   [2]
> https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/blob/master/Source/cmComputeLinkInformation.cxx#L271
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