[vtk-developers] Exporting CMake Targets with VTK-6 Dependencies

[Brad King]

On 10/23/2013 11:29 AM, Cyrus Harrison wrote:
> I am trying to export target dependencies for a target using VTK-6 into
> another CMake project using EXPORT_LIBRARY_DEPENDENCIES, basically:

The export_library_dependencies command should never be used in new
code for any reason.  In fact CMake 3.0 will introduce a CMake Policy
that will complain about calls to the command.  The only reason the
command still exists is to support old code.

> This works in most other CMake contexts -- the problem is, with VTK-6 the
> VTK libs have the suffix "-6.0".{so,dylib} and the resulting deps file
> (and CMakeCache entries in VTK_LIBRARIES) seems to leave off the "-6.0",
> probably due to special CMake rules provided by VTK.
> The only exceptions are the built-in third-party libs (such as
> libvtkjpeg-6.0) which are fine.

This is a known limitation of export_library_dependencies and is one
reason it was replaced by install(EXPORT).

> I understand INSTALL(EXPORT) is preferred to EXPORT_LIBRARY_DEPENDENCIES,
> but the generated file in that case appears to have the same issue.

The dependencies are expressed between imported library targets by
their logical name, but each has an IMPORTED_LOCATION property set
to the proper file name with the -6.0 suffix.  You just need to make
sure that VTK's are imported along with yours.

> Can anyone point me in the right direction to accomplish this?

See the tutorials here:

 http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake/Tutorials#CMake_Packages

If you're writing a project that does find_package(VTK), links to
VTK_LIBRARIES in your own targets, and then install(EXPORT)s them,
then in your <package>Config.cmake file that loads the targets
file produced by install(EXPORT)s you need to find_package(VTK)
too in order to get VTK's imported targets to satisfy dependencies.

-Brad