[cmake-developers] Header-only library targets

[蓝星灿]

Yeah, we all do such ugly hack for header project.

However it's time to change this situation right? I think current version of
interface library is already closed to what header library project wants,
through maybe original design goal was not going to do so, but I couldn’t see
any scene to use interface library except for header-only library target.

Yes, I’m badly want this feature, because AFAK there doesn’t exist an open 
source, cross-platform build system yet to support header-only target in a
graceful way. CMake already did many things right as a C/C++ build system, 
compared to many other ones, I hope Make could be the first one fulfill this.


> 在 2015年7月13日，下午5:38，Tim Blechmann <tim at klingt.org> 写道：
> 
>> I've recently switched from CMake 2.8.12 to 3.2, full of enthusiasm that
>> header-only libraries would now be better supported through the
>> INTERFACE option/target. However, the support for header-only libraries
>> isn't really great, in particular if you're using an IDE like Visual Studio.
>> 
>> The main problem is that if you define an INTERFACE target, there's no
>> way to specify headers, and they won't show up in IDEs. There's
>> workarounds with a custom target, but that's not really great for
>> example to set dependencies, populate the include directory of the
>> library or to INSTALL the target.
> 
> i'm sometimes using the workaround of generating a dummy cpp file and
> use a static library instead of an interface library ... ugly hack, but
> allows to populate msvc/xcode/qtcreator projects ...
> 
>