[CMake] How to get suffix of shared library file?

[Clark J. Wang]

On 6/14/07, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
>
> On 2007-06-14 08:58+0800 Clark J. Wang wrote:
>
> > Shared libs have different suffixes on different OSes. For example on
> Linux
> > the suffix is `.so' and on Mac OS X it's `.dylib'. I want to use
> `dlopen()'
> > in my code so I want to get the suffix and then define it in a header
> file.
> > Can I do that in CMake? And how?
>
> You could write a CMake test to create a shared object, gets its full
> name,
> and parse for the suffix.  However, that is a non-trivial amount of cmake
> script development (at least it would be for me) so let me discuss an
> alternative that might work a little easier for you.


I'll try to write a script to do that later.

Before getting to specifics, note on Unix there is a distinction between a
> shared library (a shared object opened at the start of run time by the
> run-time loader) and what I will call a plug-in (a shared object that is
> "dlopened" by an executable or library _some time_ during the course of
> run
> time). For example, there are naming conventions that must be used by
> shared
> libraries, (e.g., the library name must start with "lib"), but AFAIK those
> naming conventions don't apply to plug-ins.  So what I have done for the
> PLplot plug-ins is always build them with a suffix of ".so" regardless of
> platform.  The resulting plug-ins seems to work fine both on Linux and Mac
> OS X.  Note, we use the libltdl library (the only remnant of autotools
> still
> left in our CMake build system for PLplot) to provide a uniform wrapper
> for
> dlopen and its various equivalents on non-Linux platforms.  That library
> seems happy with the *.so names for plug-ins for the limited testing
> (I think just Linux and Mac OS X) that we have done so far.


Sounds like this is a good way to work around. Dlopen does not care about
the library suffixes :-)

Anyway, you may want to give the *.so name for plug-ins idea a try (with or
> without libltdl) if you don't want to fiddle around creating a cmake test
> to
> find out what the shared object suffix is on each of your platforms.
>
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and
> Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
> for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
> software
> package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
> Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
> (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/cmake/attachments/20070614/65682ab8/attachment-0001.htm