[CMake] MSVC7.1 static link question

[Bill Hoffman]

Philip Lowman wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Luigi Calori <l.calori at cineca.it 
> <mailto:l.calori at cineca.it>> wrote:
> 
>     I' m quite a newbie in static linking, I would like to combine two lib
>     into one:
>     say libtiff needs libjpeg and zlib
>     If you generate them separately, then when you build an executable that
>     needs libtiff, you have to link also libjpeg and zlib otherwise unref
>     happens
>     It is possible, under VisualStudio interface, to specify libjpeg.lib and
>     zlib.lib as Additional Dependencies
>     This way (even if the linker show warnings as duplicate symbols) I
>     obtain a libtiff that can be used alone.
>     My question is: can I obtain the same result with cmake?
>     I' ve tried to use TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES, that is perfecly working for
>     exe and SHARED linkage but no success: the
>     vs project has always the Additional Dependencies field empty.
> 
>     Am I completely missing something?
> 
CMake does not work that way since it is not achievable cross platform. 
  If you project is CMake based CMake will chain the libraries.  If you 
use other build tools then you will have to explicitly list libjpeg and 
zlib with the libtiff.  To do this in CMake you have two options:

1. have a library that uses libtiff
add_library(mylib ...)
target_link_libraries(mylib libtiff libjepg zlib)
add_executable(myexe ...)
target_link_libraries(myexe mylib)  # will link in tiff jpeg and zlib

2. create an imported target for libtiff
add_library(libtiff IMPORTED)
set_target_properties(libtiff PROPERTIES IMPORTED_LOCATION 
/path/to/libtiff.lib)
target_link_libraries(libtiff libjpeg zlib)
add_executable(myexe ...)
target_link_libraries(myexe libtiff) # will link jpeg and zlib


-Bill