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cmake-exploration

A place for me to play further with CMake and hopefully gain a better understanding of it's team usage capabilities.

Of particular use is this example blog post by Mirko Kiefer. It does a good job of explaining the INSTALL concept in CMake, which is a capability of the tool that I'm very interested in, but have had a hard time grasping. So, here I go... http://mirkokiefer.com/blog/2013/03/cmake-by-example/

Dependencies

So, dependency handling in CMake has really bugged me. Sometimes I end up with funky sub-directories that I don't really want or libraries that are offically external and never-changing that CMake perpetually re-builds. Grrr...it should be simpler.

I'll use this project to explore CMake's dependency managment behavior. It'll look like this:

        myapp
         /\
        /  \
log4cplus   integrator(x.y.z)

First, I'll add log4cplus. This represents a slowly changing dependency that is not likely to change during development of myapp; it's a stable project. I don't really care what version I have, I just want it.

Second, I'll add a dependency on another simple project I have on GitHub: integrator. With this depenency, I'll be bringing in something that is changin quickly and regularly releaseing new version. I'll try out different approaches to see with I can get CMake to do for me and what I have to do myself.

Let's Experiment!

log4cplus

I love loggers, so my first dependency in any new project is probably going to be a logger. I'll use log4cplus in this case. I don't want this in my git repo since it's external and slowly changing. We can treat it like a low-impact dependency, pick one version and stick to it. To avoid forcing it into my git repo, I follow the log4cplus directions to install it into /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/include. That goes smoothly on Cygwin. The final library is: cyglog4cplus.dll. Bleh name, but I can live with it.

To get CMake to work with it, I had to do a bunch of playing around & failing. find_library() and find_package() would not work for me. Neither did add_library(). Eventually, I found this simple solution to get the build to work correctly.

# bring log4cplus includes onto our path
include_directories(/usr/local/include/log4cplus/)

# add directories that the linker should use when searching for libraries
link_directories(/usr/local/bin)

# Build executable
add_executable(myapp src/main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(myapp cyglog4cplus-1-2-5.dll) # note that I had to fully specify the name here; couldn't get it to link any other way

integrator

Here, I want to emulate a team dev environment. Let's say some other team is developing a library, integrator, that myapp needs. Let's say they are actively developing and tagging releases. And, the changes are important to myapp, so I want to know which version I'm depending on, which one they are improving, and I want to be able to quickly update to their lates. Again, the integrator dependent library is independent of this project and should not be included in this project's repo. So, what do we do to use CMake to define a flexible, elastic dependency infrastructure? Let's take a few approaches.

First dependency infrastucture: Manual Install

So, let's try to first work with a separately installed library. The installation will occur by CMake. So, the integrator project needs to have created an install target for its binary (libintegrator.dll) and any of its include files. The installation needs to indicate the version number so that we can keep track of an evolving dependency and upgrade or downgrade as necessary.

NOTE: in this paradigm, CMake is not managing this dependency for us. We must do it ourselves by checking out that project and installing it manually. Here's what the CMakeLists.txt file needed.

# Make sure the include path from the manual install is provided to CMake
include_directories(/usr/local/include/integrator/)

# Make sure to link the myapp binary against the integrator library
target_link_libraries(myapp cyglog4cplus-1-2-5.dll integrator-1.1.1-SNAPSHOT)

It's not quite what we'd prefer for a team development environment. And even less satisfactory if anything Agile is going on! Ugh! Let's try to go beyond this business of making the developer manually manage the project dependencies.

Second Approach: CMake-Managed Install from the Project's Repo

Okay, here are the CMakeLists.txt modifications I made.

# bring integrator in as a dependency by using its GIT_TAG
include(ExternalProject)
ExternalProject_Add(integrator
    GIT_REPOSITORY [email protected]:buffetboy2001/integrator.git
    GIT_TAG v1.2.0
    UPDATE_DISCONNECTED 1
    INSTALL_COMMAND make install
)

Next, tell CMake where to find the includes. Since I performed a make install above, I know I can hardcode the following path for the includes:

include_directories(/usr/local/include/)  # still need this if the ExternalProject_Add operation is told to "install" also

And, I still need to tell CMake to link against the library I've pulled in from Git.

target_link_libraries(myapp cyglog4cplus-1-2-5.dll integrator-1.2.0)

So, this works! But there are some drawbacks of this approach. Reminder: I'm still learning CMake, so some of these may have CMake solutions that I'm just not aware of.

  • There is no auotmatic linking by CMake of the artifact produced from the Git repo. Even though we've told it to make and install something. So, we still have a disconnect between the ExternalProject_Add action and the target_link_libraries action. I was bitten by this disconnect almost immediately. I pulled in the Git Tag, and installed it, but my linker command was pointing to a different version, so what I had linked against was a different binary than what I isntalled. That's terrible!
  • There is apparently no way to tell CMake to find the include files in the Git repo and bring them into my project. I still had to rely upon knowing where the installed project was going to finally end up and manually tell CMake to include those header files. Again, a complete disconnect between a project that is a dependency and what CMake is going to build at the end. Grrr! * Question: Is the dependency project (integrator) supposed to be declaring includes? I wonder if something is wrong in that project's setup. Need to explore.

Third Approach: CMake-Managed Fetch of an Artifact from File System (or Artifct Service)

[] Complete Me. Not sure yet, but this may be using Externalproject_add(URL ...). That allows pulling a .tgz and expanding it, etc.

Installing

CMake has been setup to install the application. That doesn't mean much; it just dumps it into /usr/local/bin. But it does mean the binary is available to the local user. So, hey-hey! Maybe we'll focus on deploying...

Deploying

[] Complete Me. What I'm hoping to do here is actually deploy the application in the broader sense. You know, like to a DevOps pipeline that provides the goods to the end user. Let's see what we can do there. CMake, come to our rescue!

  • TBD: I'm thinking that I may do this deploy exploration in the integrator project. That way, this project will be forced to be the receiver of a deployed artifact (or, in CMake parlance, a package). Is this the same as picking up the integrator artifact from an artifact URL?