[cmake-developers] Should CMAKE_LINK_DEPENDS_NO_SHARED be on by default?

Brad King brad.king at kitware.com
Mon Feb 25 15:02:59 EST 2013


On 02/25/2013 02:56 PM, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> I guess my personal opinion is that I can think of enough theoretical 
> ways where a relink might be needed, and haven't encountered a project 
> where the relink cost is sufficiently high, to feel that I would 
> personally want to not relink.

You've just explained the reason CMake has works the way it does now ;)
However, there have been complaints from people with projects that
have hundreds of targets depending on a few shared libraries.  A
change to one of the core libraries takes a long time to re-link
everything unnecessarily.

The question is whether we should make everyone pay the cost to
relink until they discover that a new CMake allows them to disable
it, or make everyone take the risk of not relinking until they
discover they need to set an option to play it safe.

Can you elaborate on some of the theoretical cases where relinking
will be needed but no header files have changed?  It would be useful
to have them available for discussion.

-Brad



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