CMP0212

Added in version 4.4.

add_custom_command() DEPENDS does not strip .exe suffixes.

When searching for dependencies specified with the DEPENDS option of add_custom_command(), CMake 4.3 and below applied a heuristic to remove .exe from the end of DEPENDS argument values, which created a target-level dependency on an executable with that stripped name if such a target exists. This allowed using the name of the target output file as an alternative spelling when naming dependencies. However, with the emergence of CMake's target model, specifying the output file in this way is no longer needed, and leads to conflicts in creating target- and file-level dependencies when targets exist with the .exe suffix in the name itself.

The OLD behavior of this policy strips the .exe suffix from arguments to DEPENDS when searching for target-level dependencies. The NEW behavior does not strip the .exe suffix in its search. CMake will otherwise proceed normally with the other dependency search heuristics as specified in add_custom_command() DEPENDS. Users are encouraged to specify the name of the executable target if a target-level dependency is desired, or use the TARGET_FILE generator expression if a file-level dependency is desired, rather than implying the target indirectly via its output file name.

This policy was introduced in CMake version 4.4. It may be set by cmake_policy() or cmake_minimum_required(). If it is not set, CMake does not warn, and uses OLD behavior.

Note

The OLD behavior of a policy is deprecated by definition and may be removed in a future version of CMake.