[CMake] configuration packages, IMPORTED targets, and global scope

[Robert Dailey]

Thanks, I am watching that discussion and will try to contribute where I can.

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 4:02 AM, Deniz Bahadir <dbahadir at benocs.com> wrote:
> Am 06.09.2017 um 20:24 schrieb Robert Dailey:
>>
>> So it took me a while to figure out why find_package() calls I was
>> making (with CONFIG) option were not accessible outside of the
>> directory in which it was invoked. I realized that all targets seem to
>> be global by default except IMPORTED targets (according to
>> add_library() docs). I find this counterintuitive, since I expect
>> imported targets to behave the same as normal ones WRT scope.
>>
>> Is there a reason that imported targets need to be explicitly made GLOBAL?
>>
>> Barring that, I'd like to find some way to make find_package() convert
>> those imported targets to global. I don't see a target property I can
>> set or a command I can call to make an existing imported target a
>> global one. Any thoughts on workarounds? If there are none, are there
>> some changes we could make to CMake to support this behavior?
>
>
> Just a two days ago I created an issue for this:
> https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/issues/17256
>
> It would probably help if you participate in that discussion.
>
>> My use case is that I have a subdirectory I step into, which builds
>> various third party libraries and then follows up with a
>> find_package() call. I do this in a isolated but central place because
>> I have to set up various variables like CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH and many
>> others to isolate searches to a controlled location. Beyond this, if a
>> target needs one of these third party libs, the expectation is that
>> they only have to do target_link_libraries() with the import target
>> names to use those libs. However, because they are out of scope, they
>> can't use them.
>>
>
> HTH,
> Deniz
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