[CMake] Copying files to runtime directory

[Clinton Stimpson]

On Monday 21 September 2009 03:27:43 pm Tyler Roscoe wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 12:37:06PM -0600, Clinton Stimpson wrote:
> > I don't know about your setup, but for our apps, our developers just set
> > the PATH environment variable for their dlls not built as part of the
> > project.
>
> This works well for developers but often works less well for testers, or
> for making sure that our built packages have all the runtimes they need
> and can run on a virgin machine.

Our nightly build/test machines create packages and posts them for our testers 
or adventurous users.  Packaging it is also a test.  If a 3rd party dll 
doesn't get bundled up and its needed, the test fails (BundleUtilities.cmake 
has a verification step that helps us catch incomplete packages).

>
> It's also nice if the local CMake system can take care of the
> dependencies because then upgrading a thirdparty library is just setting
> a new path or new version number in the CMake system and it works for
> everyone. If we rely on PATH instead, then each developer has to do work
> every time we change a 3rdparty dependency.

Well, that depends on your dependencies and how they are included.
We try to put most of them in the source tree so each developer makes their 
own.  Having to deploy multiple binaries for multiple compilers on multiple 
platforms just for developers isn't fun.  So we're down to just a few binary 
packages that we have to distribute to developers.  They don't change often 
enough for maintainence of the PATH env. variable to be a problem.

Clint