[CMake] creating custom make targets

[Leo Breebaart]

Brad King <brad.king at kitware.com> writes:

> To answer the original question, the best way to generate a
> bunch of things only when the users asks is to use
> add_custom_command to create the rules and then associate them
> with a top-level target using add_custom_target:
> 
>    add_custom_command(
>      OUTPUT myfile.txt
>      COMMAND ... # command to generate myfile.txt here
>      DEPENDS ... # file-level depends here
>      )
> 
>    add_custom_target(test_standard DEPENDS myfile.txt)
> 
> When add_custom_target is not given the ALL option, it will not
> build unless the user explicitly requests it with "make
> test_standard". Then the custom commands it drives will still
> have normal dependencies to only rebuild when necessary.

A related problem I am currently experiencing is the following: I
have a custom target that should only ever be invoked manually,
but I *do* want it to be dependent on *all* the other top-level
targets. (It's a packaging target, so my "make bdist" should
always be preceded by a "make all".)

In Makefile terms that would be a very easy dependency to add,
because you can literally just say:

bdist: all
       <actions>

Is there a way to tell CMake to generate such a dependency? The
project is rather large, so I'd rather not add all the top-level
dependencies manually via add_dependencies(), but something like
"add_dependencies(bdist ALL)" would be nice.

-- 
Leo Breebaart  <leo at lspace.org>