[CMake] Windows library target names

[Michael Jackson]

On Jul 22, 2010, at 4:54 PM, Olaf van der Spek wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Michael Jackson
> <mike.jackson at bluequartz.net> wrote:
>> Ya know , I go back and forth on this. In my own projects I will  
>> give my
>> libs a _debug suffix because I end up installing both debug and  
>> release into
>> a local directory and my FindXXX.cmake scripts know to look for  
>> both a debug
>> and release version of the library, ala, FindQt4.cmake. I like the  
>> way Qt
>> does this and so went with TrollTech's "standard".
>>  If you don't have all the infrastructure to do that then NOT  
>> having any
>> default naming is the best way.
>
> What do you mean?
> Using the same name for all configs?
> Shown by your own example, that doesn't work.
>
> Olaf

     So here is what really happens with Visual Studio. When you  
invoke CMake you select to build "Shared" libraries and a Win64  
application. These are the basics. Visual Studio will create a  
subdirectory for "Debug" and "Release" variants for you. So when you  
build you get a shared library with debug symbols placed in the Build/ 
Debug/ directory and the same for Release (Build/Release). Now. since  
these are completely separate directories when you execute your  
program the correct libraries will be found. Great. This falls apart  
if you "install" your project to a location for other projects to get  
to. Then one library will over write the other.

    In a typical CMake workflow one would create another build  
directory and rerun CMake again to generate another Visual Studio  
solution that would have say a 32 bit Static build in it. This is what  
CMake kind of expects. You can abuse this if you want. Take a look at  
the boost-cmake project.

     Since I use Qt for my apps and they have a set way of doing  
things and since CMake can find those libraries in both Debug and  
Release variants then I modeled my own projects so they produce the  
same type of naming scheme as Qt. This allows me to install both a  
Debug and Release version into a location where other projects can  
find them, say C:\Developer\i386\MyProject or C:\Developer 
\x64\MyProject.

    If you want to go even further and decorate your library names  
like boost does then go ahead and write the CMake code (or grab it  
from the Boost-cmake project). CMake only needs to do what the other  
platforms do which is NOT decorate the library names. VS does not do  
this by default. Xcode does not. Eclipse does not. Makefiles do not  
(unless you write it to). SO that is why CMake does not do it.

    You _can_ very easily do this if you want. The code is out there  
in the wild in the form of macros that can be invoked from CMake that  
will set all of this up for you. You just have to look for it (or ask  
the right person... )

Does that help?
Mike Jackson