[CMake] Q: cmExportFileGenerator::GenerateImportedFileCheckLoop

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Monday 12 March 2012, Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
>   CMake 2.8.7 recently added a new behavior when reading export files:
> 
> http://cmake.org/gitweb?p=cmake.git;a=commitdiff;h=a2be068c
> 
>   I perfectly understand the goal here, I think this is a great user
> functionality. However this breaks the old behavior of cmake being
> tolerant with missing files. This is particularly difficult to handle
> for large package such as VTK. Currently in debian we split the VTK
> package into sub-packages:
>  * C++ dev,
>  * Qt dev,
>  * TCL,
>  * Java and
>  * Python bindings.
>   Since there is a single export file, we are now forced to install
> all those sub-packages while in the past we could bypass any cmake
> internals checks and only install -say- C++-dev package.

Here's my opinion on this: I understand the issue, but basically this is the 
purpose of the patch, to make an exports file fail if the files it describes 
are not actually present.
I mean, if the debian packages did that, then the installed exports files were 
basically broken, since they created imported targets referencing non-existant 
files, so you would get link errors at build time.

I think the proper way to make this work is to split the exports-file into 
multiple files.

Alex