[cmake-developers] Using cmake pkg-config-like in non-cmake builds

[Brad King]

On 11/22/2010 03:55 PM, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> I have a slightly different idea: instead of having cmake generate pc-files, 
> modify/extend cmake so that it can be used similar to pkg-config by projects 
> which don't use cmake as their buildsystem.

Interesting.

> It already somewhat works:
> $ cmake -DMODE=COMPILE -DCOMPILER_ID=GNU -DPACKAGE=PNG -P cmake-config.cmake
>  -I/usr/include -I/usr/include
>  
>  $ cmake -DMODE=LINK -DCOMPILER_ID=GNU -DPACKAGE=PNG -P cmake-config.cmake
>  /usr/lib/libpng.so /usr/lib/libz.so
>  
> Do you think this makes sense ?

Yes.  It might be hard to do in non-toy cases though.

> Current issues:
> * the output goes to stderr instead stdout
> * the output has line breaks
> * actual problem: currently it's not possible to use commands which deal with 
> targets in script-mode (I disabled that in 2007 since at least back then it 
> didn't make sense). This means that find-modules which use try_compile() 
> internally fail, and also those which create imported targets.

Consider implementing the outer-most script in bash (or plain bourne shell).
Internally it can run "cmake" on a test project that prints information
during its configuration but never builds.  Then you can use sed to parse
out the results.

> Do you think it is worth to put some effort into this ?

I'm not going to spend time on it but I can review what others produce.

-Brad