[CMake] Copying files to runtime directory

[Michael Jackson]

I just include some CMake code to copy the Qt Dlls from the Qt  
installation directory into the local Debug or Release directories.  
Kinda clunky but gets the job done.

--
Mike Jackson <www.bluequartz.net>


On Sep 23, 2009, at 3:09 PM, Jeroen Dierckx wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 9:06 PM, Anatoly Shirokov  
> <shirokov_a at mail.ru> wrote:
> We use the RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY property to specify runtime  
> location  for each target:
>
> set_target_properties(bla-bla-bla
>    PROPERTIES
>    RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/Execute/$ 
> {CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE})
> )
> I hope it helps.
>
> Thanks, but the problem I was facing was about dlls and other files  
> from external dependencies that need to be copied to the runtime  
> directory.
>
>
> Jeroen Dierckx:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> In Windows, we need to copy a bunch of files (dlls and other runtime
>> dependencies) to the runtime directory, mostly belonging to external
>> dependencies. Those files are different for debug and release builds.
>> So I created a function to do just that. I came across several
>> problems or limitations in cmake while doing that. Here is how I did
>> it, and some remarks for each step
>>
>> - For a certain external dependency, I look for a specific
>> platform-dependent directory, with some shared files, and some only
>> for debug or release builds. I have to exclude certain files and
>> directories (.svn directories in this case). It would be nice to have
>> an EXCLUDE parameter for the file(GLOB* functions, like in the  
>> install
>> function. I worked around this by iterating over all the files in the
>> list and removing them when they match a certain REGEX.
>>
>> - I wanted to create post-build command to copy the necessary files
>> after building, because they are only needed when actually
>> running/debugging the application. There currently is no way to
>> generate different custom commands for different configurations. I
>> could work around this by using some if-tests inside the custom
>> command itself, but I decided against it because it would be too
>> Visual Studio-specific.
>>
>> - So I copy all files to each build directory (one for each
>> configuration that is generated, mind that for Visual Studio no build
>> configuration is chosen at configure time) in cmake. This of course  
>> is
>> not very optimal, as it copies the files for all configurations, also
>> the ones I will probably never build. Here I used the cmake command
>> with -E copy_if_different. This works, but spawns a new process for
>> each file to be copied. I could use configure_file, but that seemed a
>> bit hacky to me.
>>
>> All in all, my method works, but to summarize, the following features
>> would be a nice addition to cmake:
>> - an EXCLUDE parameter for the file globbing commands
>> - configuration-specific custom commands
>> - a cmake command to copy files (with a parameter to only do it when
>> the files differ)
>>
>> Greetz,
>> JeDi
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