[cmake-developers] Question about ALIAS targets

[Stephen Kelly]

Brad King wrote:

> Steve, is there any reason for the restriction other than not implementing
> more use cases up front?

There may be more information in the mailing list archives, but as far as I 
remember, yes - we wanted to be conservative because we didn't know more 
use-cases. Additionally, we didn't know the impact of making the feature 
more unrestricted. 

Eg - making it easy to alias imported targets means you can easily get 
imported target names which vary per project (Qt5::Core, Qt5::QtCore, 
TheQt5CoreLibrary etc) which doesn't seem useful. An desire to be able to do 
that may just be a mask on an underlying problem. CMake doesn't need 
multiple 'equally good' ways to solve the same problem.

Thanks,

Steve.