[cmake-developers] Question about ALIAS targets

[David Cole]

>> After my find_package(OtherProj) call, which is a super build which
>> defines lots of imported targets, I want the target to be named gtest
>> to match its library name, but OtherProj has named it googletest.
>
> Why isn't there a standard name? Should upstream provide the imported
> target? Has any effort been made to make upstream provide it? Is the name
> from OtherProj namespaced? Why do you need it to have a particular name? Why
> does OtherProj expose it? Should it expose that target for you to use (it
> seems an internal thing to me)?
>

There is a standard name. "Upstream" in this case is a super build of
many projects, with an imported target for each project named after
the project that means "the main lib (or all the libs) in the
project". Now, for projects that already have "good imported targets"
(Qt, VTK), I don't bother creating imported targets, I allow client
projects to link directly to those imported targets. But for projects
that don't, I create a convenience imported target named after the
project.

In the case of googletest, the project name is named for its GitHub
repo, but there is no library of that name and its install provides no
imported targets. And the "main" library is just gtest. So I create an
imported target named after the project, but in this case, I also want
to create an imported target for each lib. So I do, but that means my
googletest and gtest targets are essentially identical except for
their names. ( ** i.e. aliases of each other, but both imported... **
)

I don't need it to have a particular name, but I want to follow a
chain of naming conventions: naming the project after its repo,
keeping an imported target for each project in my super build named
after the project, and then, where it makes sense, also having
per-library imported targets.

I'm not expecting anybody to do any work on this, or to loosen the
restriction for my convenience... I just wanted to know if there were
a good reason for the error message. Sounds like "nobody needed it
yet, and we were being conservative" is the answer. Which is a good
answer.


Thanks,
David C.