[CMake] debug/release subdirs in visual studio projects

[Brad King]

Christian Verbeek wrote:
> This had been discussed in
> http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/cmake/2004-January/004644.html
> 
> Now more than two years have passed by and the problem still remains.

That's because changing it represents a fundamental change in the design 
of the generator.

 > In
> visual studio the generated files go into a Release/Debug subdir
> depending on the build type choosen in the IDE. If your application
> depends on relative pathes to find other stuff (like plugins) this is a
> problem. I really would like to skip these subdirs to make the directory
> structure of the build output identitcal to what you get with nmake or make.

There are other solutions to your problem.

1.) If you INSTALL the project the per-configuration subdirs are not used.

2.) If you want the project to work from the build tree look at the 
definition of CMAKE_INTDIR in the preprocessor:

#ifdef CMAKE_INTDIR
/* Account for the per-config subdirectory in computing paths
    The value of CMAKE_INTDIR is a string containing the
    per-configuration subdirectory.  */
const char* mypath = "some/path" CMAKE_INTDIR;
#else
/* Use normal relative paths.  */
const char* mypath = "some/path";
#endif

This preprocessor symbol is defined on a per-configuration basis for the 
multi-configuration generators.  This file contains an example of 
exactly what you want to do:

http://www.vtk.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/Wrapping/Tcl/vtkTkAppInit.cxx?view=markup

Just look at the relative path computation contained inside a 
CMAKE_INTDIR preprocessor test.

-Brad