[CMake] retreiving the libraries the maven way?

[Andreas Haferburg]

CMake doesn't support this out of the box. For most library dependencies, it's not even possible to 
retrieve their version, because either the FindXYZ scripts aren't written properly, or because the 
library doesn't provide it in the first place. Every library and every Find script does things 
differently. E.g. some find scripts use find_package(Lib) and define Lib_FOUND, others LIB_FOUND. My 
favorite: find_package(Qt4) defines QT4_FOUND, but ALL OTHER variables are prefixed with "QT_".

I ended up setting up a library directory on our server which follows a simple naming convention, 
<lib>-<version>-<compiler>. On the local developer machines, a similar directory exists for the 
libraries. If a particular library directory doesn't exist locally, it is fetched from the server. 
Simple, stupid, but since there is no meta information available as part of c++ libraries, that's 
the best I could come up with. If you need more help I can post some scripts.

Best regards
Andreas


On 14.01.2013 09:17, Nicolas Herbaut wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I started working on a new c++ project comming back after 4+ years of java coding.
>
> For java, I use nexus, which is a binary repository server, that provides an nice REST API that
> allows clients to download dependencies by providing the library name and a target version.
>
> I'm wondering if it would be feasible and difficult to port this logic into a cmake plugin, and
> allowing the find_library to seamlessly retreive the library from the system OR from a nexus server.
>
> currently all our dependencies are stored in the svn, which slows down our builds and is not very
> flexible.
>
> Let me be more specific by describing my usecase.
>
> 1- On a Windows PC, I need the zlib dll and the standard C dll to build my project
> 2- I issue a find_library command specifying both custom library paths and a nexus server URL
> 3 - for the standard C library, cmake findsout that it's already located into the system
> 4 - for zlib, cmake performs a request to the server which acknowledge the availability of the dll
> 5 - cmake downloads the library in a cache folder and tells the generator to link to the library it
> downloaded
> 6 - if the library cannot be found on the system and on the binary server, cmake fails
> 7 - the same thing happen on a mac system, but this time both the C lib and zlib are on the path,
> hence binary server is not even queried for a lib.
>
> Could you guys give me your insights for this project?
>
>
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