[CMake] Dependencies and libraries..How does it work?

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Friday 17 June 2011, Glenn Coombs wrote:
> If the library you are trying to build is one that is totally under your
> control then really it should be a subdirectory of your MY_APP source tree
> so that you can call add_subdirectory() on it.  If MY_LIB is shared across
> multiple projects then you can always arrange for it to appear as a
> subdirectory of MY_APP when you check the code out from your revision
> control system.  We do this with cvs modules but I'm sure that git and
> mercurial have similar capabilities.
> 
> If you still can't get MY_LIB to be a subdirectory of MY_APP then you might
> be able to build it using add_directory with the second argument:
> 
> add_subdirectory(${LIB_SRC} mylib)


Yes.

Just some comments:

You should either: 

* build the library and the executable within one cmake project, then cmake 
will take care of everything, no need for link_directories(), etc. You can 
just do
target_link_libraries(myApp myLib)
and that's it.

* or build them in two completely separate projects. In this case, when you 
build the myApp project, the cmake code in myApp must *find* the installed 
myLib somewhere (using e.g. find_package() or find_library()).
It definitely should not guess about where the source directory of myLib is 
and try to run cmake there. These are then two completely separate things.

Alex