[cmake-developers] INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES property?

[Stephen Kelly]

Hi,

Last year we discussed the addition of a INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES property 
to replace the (IMPORTED_)?LINK_INTERFACE_LIBRARIES(_<CONFIG>)? properties.

 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.programming.tools.cmake.devel/5398

After a lot of back-and-forth, I bypassed the issue of that property by 
adding generator expression support to the 
(IMPORTED_)?LINK_INTERFACE_LIBRARIES(_<CONFIG>)? properties instead. Part of 
the policy under discussion relied on an assumption that the LINK_LIBRARIES 
property does not contain generator expressions, but that assumption won't 
be true anymore after 2.8.11 is released. I think that related to the fact 
that if LINK_LIBRARIES contains generator expressions, and the link 
implementation is the link interface, then only the new 
INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES should be populated and not the old interface 
properties (because they couldn't handle the genexes).

So, if we still want to introduce INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES, we may need to 
re-think that part. Alternatively we could decide to finally drop the 
INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES property. If we do introduce it, I'd want to get it 
in before the INTERFACE_LIBRARY so that that target type only supports the 
new property.

Comments?

Thanks,

Steve.