[CMake] Does find_library check that a found library does in fact link?

[Clifford Yapp]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 3:22 AM, Hendrik Sattler <post at hendrik-sattler.de>wrote:


> People tend to misunderstand the purpose of build systems like CMake and
> autotools. They try to make the detection bullet-proof and most likely fail.
> You can see that this is wrong by looking at those auto* setups that take
> ages to detect all possible header files and use an ifdef hell to handle
> that in the code, run lots of link and symbol-finding tests, and still fail
> on conditions that the author simple didn't consider or know.
>

The problem is in real world situations the software developer often has
virtually zero control over system administration issues on systems their
users are working with, and when your trying to be very portable you have to
spot and handle as many as possible of the wide variety of situations that
exist in the wild.  The decision on how much effort to put into working
around the existing issues (or at the very least detecting them before
putting all the time and resources into a full compilation) is determined by
the goals of the project.  Knowing that *all* situations can't be handled is
not a reason (at least for some projects) to avoid handling as much as they
can - they keep improving their handling when they run into new issues.


> I prefer option 1. It's not CMake's duty to detect or paper over messed-up
> systems. That's the administrator's job!
>

Except there are cases where a software developer has to do their best to
make their program work with the system as it is.  Spotting results that
aren't valid libraries in configuration is a time saver under those
conditions.

Couldn't CMake provide the means to let developers turn on testing
mechanisms (just disable them by default)?  A project could explicitly
enable CMAKE_CHECK_SHARED_LIBRARY_LINKING if they wanted to run the tests,
and projects who don't want it could ignore the issue and never know the
difference.  As long as CMake provided the core mechanism and hooks needed
to perform the test and feed in options, each project could decide what to
do from there.

Cheers,
CY
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