[CMake] External dependencies and Windows

[Michael Wild]

Hi


On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Ansis Māliņš <ansis.malins at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm just learning CMake and posting questions in this mailing list, but
> the answers I get only confuse me. It seems I must take a step back and ask
> more general questions.
>
> In Linux there is a package for everything, so you just find_package
> whatever you need.
>
> But on Windows most libraries exist only as zip files that you're supposed
> to unpack right in your build environment and ship them together with the
> executable. (Basically, in practice, there is no such thing as shared
> libraries in Windows - nothing for find_package to find.)
>

What then are DLL's? They are the shared libraries of the Windows world.
True, the semantics are a bit different, but they are dynamically linked.
It's also not true that on Windows everything is a "zip files that you're
supposed to unpack right in your build environment". If you don't believe
me, try to take a look at Qt or Python.


>
> So how am I supposed to write portable CMake scripts in face of this?
>


 Often the Windows packages are installed into a few well known locations,
or even better, create a registry key containing installation information
which you then can use to find the software in your CMake code. Also, for
SDL I would recommend to use the FindSDL.cmake module (not sure whether
that works with SDL2, though), and only if that fails, to resort to
ExternalProject. It is good practice to offer the user the choice which way
should be used through a cached variable.

HTH

Michael
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