[CMake] How to create "staging" rules

[Matthew Bentham]

Thanks Paul, I often need to do this and it's interesting to see that you've come up with something similar.

When you have several of these in the same project, do you ever have trouble with more than one of them trying to create the staging directory at the same time in parallel builds?

Do you use this on Windows with Visual Studio?  My version seems to have a problem if the staged target has a .exe extension, and I was wondering if you'd seen that too?

Matthew

On 19 Jun 2013, at 18:29, Paul Smith wrote:

> Well, no love for this question but I figured it out myself:
> 
>  macro(stageobj target dir)
>      get_property(targetpath TARGET ${target} PROPERTY LOCATION)
>      get_filename_component(targetname ${targetpath} NAME)
>      add_custom_command(OUTPUT "${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/${dir}/${targetname}"
>          COMMAND "${CMAKE_COMMAND}" -E make_directory "${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/${dir}"
>          COMMAND "${CMAKE_COMMAND}" -E copy "$<TARGET_FILE:${target}>" "${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/${dir}"
>          DEPENDS ${targetname}
>          COMMENT "Staging ${target} to ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/${dir}"
>          VERBATIM)
>      add_custom_target("stage_${target}" ALL
>          DEPENDS "${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/${dir}/${targetname}")
>  endmacro()
> 
> It's invoked like: "stageobj(myProgram bin)".  Note I believe this only
> works with derived objects; I have a different macro I use for source
> files that need to be staged (header files etc.)
> 
> Hope this is of interest to someone else!
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2013-06-17 at 15:46 -0400, I wrote:
>> I need my build to "stage" the final results (which consist of a few
>> binaries, shared libraries, static libraries, and header files plus some
>> scripts etc.) to a location in my workspace where they can be found for
>> testing and packaging.  #1 requirement: this staging MUST happen as part
>> of the default target.  It cannot require running a special target
>> (like, oh, say... install :-)).
>> 
>> I am currently using the "install" facility of CMake to do it using a
>> hack like this http://marc.info/?l=cmake&m=130365717914933&w=2 to invoke
>> the install as a side-effect of the default target.  This hack has some
>> annoying issues so I'm looking for a better way.
>> 
>> What I wanted to try to do instead was create a "stage" target using
>> add_custom_command() / add_custom_target() that would have an output
>> file of the staged file and depend on the built target, and where the
>> rule body would do the copy, something like this:
>> 
>>  macro(stagebin target)
>>      add_custom_command(OUTPUT "${STAGEDIR}/bin/${target}"
>>          COMMAND "${CMAKE_COMMAND}" -E make_directory "${STAGEDIR}/bin"
>>          COMMAND "${CMAKE_COMMAND}" -E copy "$<TARGET_FILE:${target}>" "${STAGEDIR}/bin"
>>          MAIN_DEPENDENCY ${target}
>>          COMMENT "Staging ${target} to ${STAGEDIR}/bin"
>>          VERBATIM)
>>      add_custom_target("stage_${target}" ALL
>>          DEPENDS "${STAGEDIR}/bin/${target}")
>>  endmacro()
>> 
>> This actually seems to work very well for binaries, and I have a version
>> of this macro for generic files that takes a list of files and works for
>> header files.
>> 
>> The problem is libraries.  The above works due to a trick, that the
>> target name is identical to the output file name, but for libraries the
>> target name is something like "mylibrary" but the output file name is
>> "libmylibrary.a" or "libmylibrary.so" (or "libmylibrary.dylib" or
>> "libmylibrary.dll" or whatever).
>> 
>> So I cannot use ${target} in the OUTPUT string; it doesn't work.
>> Unfortunately I also cannot use a generator expression like
>> $<TARGET_FILE:${target}> here.  So, I'm kind of stuck.
>> 
>> Any pointers on how to create a "staging" rule like this for libraries?
> 
> 
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