[cmake-developers] Need some pointers on learning the code

[Robert Dailey]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Brad King <brad.king at kitware.com> wrote:
> On 05/13/2013 02:07 PM, Robert Dailey wrote:
>> Actually now that I think about this a littler closer, changing the
>> generator expressions may not work for a specific case I'm blocked on.
>>
>> I store my third party library binaries in a "debug" and "release"
>> directories. I have a custom target that I define to copy the
>> appropriate debug or release DLLs to the appropriate output
>> directories, so that when I debug my applications, they find the
>> appropriate DLLs in the same directory. So the copy mapping should be
>> as follows:
>>
>> debug -> Debug
>> release -> Release
>> release -> RelWithDebInfo
>> release -> MinSizeRel
>>
>> Specifically for the RELEASE case. I can't use $<CONFIGURATION> for
>> the source directory, since the name is "release" between all 3
>> release configurations. This case is easily solved with issue 9974,
>> however. Any thoughts?
>
> This looks like the common use case I explain here:
>
>  http://www.cmake.org/Bug/view.php?id=9974#c29033
>
> You don't need any new features for it.

(Sorry for the double-email Brad, I forgot to include the mailing list
in my reply)

I wanted to follow up here with some concerns. Right now I cannot
create an imported target with multiple output files. Suppose I have a
library with the following DLLs:

library1:
   debug:
         a_d.dll
         b_d.dll
         c_d.dll
   release:
         a.dll
         c.dll

Note that there is no corresponding "b.dll" in release, so I need to
handle a couple of cases:
1. A library may have a different number of DLLs between release &
debug configurations
2. The library names between configurations need not match (as shown
by the _d suffix).

I don't think the imported target solution will work here. Can you
think of any other clever workarounds, or do we need a different
feature in CMake for this? Basically I'm creating a custom target that
depends on these output files. I have 1 custom command per
configuration to copy these files to the configuration output
directory, but since I cannot specify DEPENDS_<CONFIG> in
add_custom_target(), I'm not able to specify varying numbers of
dependencies. Could we perhaps add a DEPENDS_<CONFIG> to
add_custom_target, so that each configuration will end up depending on
different custom commands?

Thanks in advance.