[cmake-developers] Documented property IMPORTED_LOCATION does not exist

[Alan W. Irwin]

The documentation you get from

cmake --help-full

refers to the IMPORTED_LOCATION property as one of the more important
ones set for imported targets.  I have to agree that location is the
most important property for imported targets, but the name appears to
be wrong for the documentation of this property!

After screwing around for a while trying to use the above
property for my imported targets, I discovered (by guessing) that the
name of a property that actually does give the location information is
IMPORT_LOCATION, not IMPORTED_LOCATION.  For what it is worth,
IMPORT_LOCATION works for an imported library, and I haven't tried
this on imported executables. (By the way, LOCATION works as well, but
that appears from the documentation to be a left-over from CMake 2.4
which is why I tried to get IMPORTED_LOCATION to work and when that
failed, switched to the currently undocumentated IMPORT_LOCATION.)

I find IMPORTED_LOCATION is mentioned in the following
places in the cmake-2.8.6 source tree:

software at raven> find cmake-2.8.6 -print0 -type f \
|xargs -0 grep -l IMPORTED_LOCATION
cmake-2.8.6/ChangeLog.txt
cmake-2.8.6/Modules/FindQt4.cmake
cmake-2.8.6/Tests/ExportImport/Import/A/CMakeLists.txt
cmake-2.8.6/Tests/SimpleInstall/CMakeLists.txt
cmake-2.8.6/Tests/SimpleInstallS2/CMakeLists.txt
cmake-2.8.6/Source/cmTarget.cxx
cmake-2.8.6/Source/cmAddExecutableCommand.h
cmake-2.8.6/Source/cmAddLibraryCommand.h
cmake-2.8.6/Source/cmExportBuildFileGenerator.cxx
cmake-2.8.6/Source/cmExportInstallFileGenerator.cxx

A similar search for IMPORT_LOCATION found nothing at all!

However, I spot-checked cmake-2.8.6/Source/cmTarget.cxx, and all those
mentions of IMPORTED_LOCATION appear to be documentation strings
rather than executable code, and I was unable to find why
IMPORTED_LOCATION does not work for me while IMPORT_LOCATION does. So
this needs someone who is familiar with the CMake code to figure out
what the actual problem is here, and to decide whether a fix to the
documentation strings is all that is required or whether some deeper
change needs to be made.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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