[CMake] faking convenience libraries

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Bill Hoffman wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>> Bill Hoffman wrote:
>>
>> There are no other differences in the PCRE library.  It is straight C 
>> code, not Chicken output, so it doesn't need any of Chicken's usual 
>> flags.  It is a properly independent sub-library.  We just don't want 
>> to have people doing -lchicken -lpcre, we want the PCRE library 
>> embedded in -lchicken.
> So, in a perfect world, (where everyone uses CMake :-)  ) this would 
> not be a problem.  Because cmake will automatically chain the 
> dependent libraries.  The user only has to specifiy -lchicken and 
> cmake will add the -lpcre.   

For clarity, let's say I make 2 static libraries:
- pcre_static_pic, for use with our shared libchicken et al
- pcre_static_nopic, for use with our libchicken-static et al

The latter case runs into the "static library as part of a static 
library" problem.  You're saying CMake handles this?  I thought on some 
platforms, the underlying "ar" tool can't handle this.  The CMake 
archives also seemed to indicate this, although I didn't look closely at 
the posting date of the archives.  If CMake can indeed handle the 
chaining of static libraries, I would prefer to do that.  It's cleaner / 
easier to specify in the build, especially if other people aren't CMake 
experts.

If, on the other hand, I have to produce the *.o files,

> You can put .o files into the list of sources for a cmake target.   I 
> suppose you could get something that would only build the stuff twice, 
> once for shared and once for static.   And use target_depends to make 
> sure things are built in the right order...

then I'll go ahead and do that.  Just making sure I 100% understand your 
answer.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every