Prepare the following (erroneous) CMakeLists.txt file:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.10)
project(foo)
add_executable(foo foo.cpp)
add_compile_definitions(BAR=123)
add_compile_definitions is new in CMake 3.12, so processing the above file in CMake 3.10 will result in an error.
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:4 (add_compile_definitions):
Unknown CMake command "add_compile_definitions".
However, using CMake 3.12 or later, no errors or warnings are output.
Therefore, as long as you are using CMake 3.12 or later, you will not notice the error.
(In this case, we can use add_compile_options instead of add_compile_definitions, but that is not the main issue.)
You may say, "you shouldn't write cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.10) because you are not using CMake 3.10, you should write the version you are actually using".
However, there may be cases where modifications are made to an existing code base.
Is there any way to realize that when you do so, you inadvertently write something that is not usable in the specified version?
For example, is there a tool like lint that can check for features that are not available in a given version?
Currently, is the only way to do this is to install the specified version of CMake?
You have to test with the minimum required version. But even if no error occurs, your test might be incomplete, because you only test these parts of the code, that you are actually running. If your setup does not provide an optional dependency or you did not set a flag, the code executed for this dependency or flag will not be tested.
Depending on your setup, it makes sense to have a continuous testing (GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub actions) that runs your CMake code with CMake in the minimum required version. Then you get early warning that someone added code that is above the required CMake version and you should revert it or increase the requirements.
It is really not a satisfying answer and in general not a satisfying situation.
usr1234567 wrote a good answer, but let me add an additional point:
I think you (and many others; you're in good company) are misunderstanding the guarantee made by cmake_minimum_required(VERSION X). Many people believe it means the following:
This project will build with version X.
That is not the case at all. What it actually promises is:
If this project builds with version X, then it will build on versions Y > X.
That is to say, it is a backwards compatibility guarantee, not a forwards compatibility guarantee. You cannot author a project with a newer version of CMake and expect it to work with older versions without testing it.
Related
Bret Brown in his talk Modern CMake Modules recommends using Conan (or other package manager) to deliver reusable CMake code.
As instructed by Brett I've created a Conan package that delivers a MyHelpersConfig.cmake CMake file.
(The MyHelpersConfig.cmake file is the content of the package; it is not part of the package build system.)
My Conan package delivers only this one file.
Unfortunately I don't know how to make this line in CMake actually work:
find_package(MyHelpers)
Brett mentions, that when using Conan you need to manually override CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, but he doesn't go into more detail (link to the relevant portion of his talk: Delivering CMake modules).
Does anyone know what needs to go into the Conan recipe, and how to use the package from CMake, to make it work?
EDIT:
From what I was able to figure out cmake_multi (generator I use when consuming packages) will update CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, but only if CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE is set (which is rarely the case for multi configuration projects):
if(${CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE} MATCHES "Debug")
set(CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH ${CONAN_CMAKE_MODULE_PATH_DEBUG} ${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH})
...
We would need to add something like this to CMake (pseudocode):
set(CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH ${CONAN_CMAKE_MODULE_PATH_$<CONFIG>} ${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH})
But that is impossible.
So my conclusion would be that it should work out of the box for non-multi configuration projects, and can not possibly work for multi configuration projects.
The problem I had was that when consuming a package from CMake Conan was not updating CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, and therefore MyHelpersConfig.cmake was not found.
This happened when using a cmake_multi generator for the consuming project.
Single-configuration generators should not have this problem, or could be solved easily by adding something like:
set(CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH ${CONAN_CMAKE_MODULE_PATH_<BUILD-MODE-HERE>} ${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH})
To solve it for multi-config generators you can add the following to CMake in the consuming project:
set(CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH ${CONAN_<YOUR-PACKAGE-NAME>_ROOT_RELEASE} ${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH})
This will work only under assumption that CMake files you deliver in your Conan package are the same for all build types (Debug, Release...). So it is a viable solution for general-purpose utility functions.
I don't think it is possible solve this situation when CMake files differ between build modes, simply because in multi-config projects build type is known only after all find_package() calls were already evaluated.
I'm trying to understand what some of the best practices are when using modern CMake (3.13+) with respect to building and including vendored or submoduled code.
Say I'm building a library MyLib. My file structure is something like this
MyLib
|-CMakeLists.txt
|-src
|-include
|-submodules
|-libgeos
In this example, I've included libgeos as a git submodule, because it's really convenient to be able to clone the project and immediately build and run tests because that dependency is present. This could also be solved by using FetchContent or something, and my question still stands; the important thing is that I do not want to rely on libgeos being installed in build environment.
Note I picked libgeos arbitrarily; I have no idea if libgeos is set up as a cmake project appropriately for this example, but this is all theoretical and I just needed some concrete library name. Please do not use the specific details of how libgeos is configured to answer this, unless libgeos is a good example of conventional cmake.
But now, there's some other project that wants to use my project, and it needs libgeos and doesn't want to depend on my project providing it.
OtherProject
|-CMakeLists.txt
|-src
|-include
|-submodules
|-libgeos
|-MyLib
|submodules
|-libgeos
When you clone OtherProject, you get two versions of libgeos, and maybe that's not great; but it's not a huge issue either. And maybe they're not the same version; say MyLib requires libgeos >= 2.0, so 2.0 is what MyLib includes, and OtherProject requires libgeos>=2.1 so OtherProject includes libgeos >= 2.1.
Now we potentially end up with some build issues. If we have the following line in OtherProject/CMakeLists.txt
add_subdirectory(submodules/libgeos)
and then again, that same line within MyLib/CMakeLists.txt, we end up with cmake errors because libgeos as a target is defined twice in the build. This can be solved a couple of ways.
Check if geos exists before adding it
if(NOT TARGET geos)
add_subdirectory(submodules/libgeos)
endif()
But this case has some issues; if that blob is in OtherProject at the top, it's fine and both projects use libgeos 2.1. But if it's in OtherProject after add_subdirectory(submodules/MyLib), then the geos 2.0 version gets added to the build, which may or may not fail loudly (Hopefully it would).
This could also be solved with find_package. Both projects include cmake/FindGeos.cmake which use that blurb above (if(NOT TARGET...)) to add geos the build and then the top project cmake files can do this
list(APPEND CMAKE_MODULE_PATH cmake)
find_package(geos 2) # (or 2.1)
then it doesn't matter what order they try to include geos, because they will both defer to FindGeos.cmake in OtherProject because it's first in the module path.
But now there's a new issue, some ThirdProject wants to use MyLib also, but ThirdProject wants to depend on libgeos which is in the system environment. It uses find_package(geos 2.1 CONFIG) to use the installed GeosConfig.cmake file, which adds geos::geos to the build and sets geos_FOUND. Suddenly, MyLib fails to build, because geos_FOUND was set, but I'm doing target_link_library(mylib PUBLIC geos).
So this could be solved by adding add_library(geos::geos ALIAS geos) in both custom FindGeos.cmake files, then it doesn't matter if geos was built from source or using the installed version, the target names are the same either way.
Now we get to my actual questions:
Lets start with
Am I crazy, no one does this, and my team is trying to use cmake all wrong?
Is there some feature of cmake that I've just completely missed that solves all these problems?
I suspect there's a good few books or presentations that cover this topic, but I just don't know where to look because there's so many; what should I be looking at? I've seen the CMake Packages page, which looks like it solves the problem when you're using all projects which are configured according to that page; but it doesn't really answer how to bridge the gap between older and newer projects.
If I'm not crazy and there's no straightforward answer or presentation that I can look at, then
What should the cmake configuration for both MyLib and libgeos look like so that these cases work?
MyLib is built alone
MyLib is built as part of a larger project which provides a different version of geos
MyLib is built as part of a larger project which depends on a different version of geos in the environment
I understand that cmake provides helpers that could be used to produce MyLibConfig.cmake if I wanted to install it in the environment. I also see that the export() function exists, which could be used to save those files in the build tree somewhere and then find them with find_package in config mode. But this feels a bit odd to me to do because it's not a multi-stage build, it's just one invocation of cmake then make.
But lets say that's the right answer and the CMake for libgeos doesn't follow it. Would it be appropriate to have FindGeos.cmake do something like this?
if(NOT geos_FOUND)
add_subdirectory(submodules/libgeos)
export(geos NAMESPACE geos)
find_package(geos CONFIG)
endif()
If you build C++14 code with G++ and libstdc++, there's a library named libstdc++fs, which is separate from the rest of libstdc++, and contains the code for std::experimental::filesystem. If you don't link against it, you'll get undefined references.
The "trick" I'm using for overcoming this right now is:
if ("${CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_ID}" STREQUAL "GNU")
set(CXX_FILESYSTEM_LIBRARIES "stdc++fs")
endif()
and later:
target_link_libraries(my_target PUBLIC ${CXX_FILESYSTEM_LIBRARIES})
but - I don't like having to place this code in every project I work on. Is there a simpler or more standard idiom I could use? Some way this will all happen implicitly perhaps, with some CMake behind-the-scences magic?
tl;dr: Nothing right now, wait for a newer CMake version
As #Pedro graciously points out, this is a known problem, and there is an open issue about it at KitWare's GitLab site for CMake:
Portable linking for C++17 std::filesystem
If using CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 and std::filesystem, GCC requires linking of an extra library: stdc++fs. ... If C++17 is enabled, would it be worth automatically linking to stdc++fs for GCC versions which require this? Likewise for any quirks in other compilers or libraries.
The KitWare issue is about C++17, for which apparently you still need the separate extra library (i.e. it's not just because of the "experimentality" in C++14). Hopefully we'll see some traction on this matter - but
Note: If you're experiencing this problem with C++17's std::filesystem, you're in luck - that code is built into libstdc++ beginning with GCC 9, so if you're using g++ 9 or later, and std::filesystem, you should no longer experience this problem.
I am working on a project that uses CMake. The top CMakeLists.txt file contains the following line:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.7.2) # Kittens will die if you switch to an earlier version of CMake. We suggest using CMake 3.8.0.
I want to force all developers to switch to CMake 3.8.0, but for some reasons, not all developers have administration rights and are not able to switch from 3.7.2 to 3.8.0 immediately. Actually, we do not need any new features of version 3.8.0, but our policy is to use always the newest and greatest tools to prevent "porting up" problems in the future - for instance switching fast from Qt4 to Qt5 was a good decission in the past - I know switching always to the newest libraries and tools has also some drawbacks as discussed here, but we want to do it this way.
Because of this, instead of forcing everyone to use version 3.8.0, I'd like to output a warning message if CMake 3.7.2 is used. Somehow like this:
# not working - just pseudocode
if(CMAKE_VERSION == "3.7.2")
message("Please consider to switch to CMake 3.8.0")
endif()
I tried to read the VERSION variable, but this does not work. Does anyone now how this check can be achieved?
There exist a few variables for that, described here:
CMAKE_MAJOR_VERSION
major version number for CMake, e.g. the "2" in CMake 2.4.3
CMAKE_MINOR_VERSION
minor version number for CMake, e.g. the "4" in CMake 2.4.3
CMAKE_PATCH_VERSION
patch version number for CMake, e.g. the "3" in CMake 2.4.3
Also, the variable CMAKE_VERSION contains the string for the version.
In your case, you would, for instance, use the following:
if(${CMAKE_VERSION} VERSION_LESS "3.8.0")
message("Please consider to switch to CMake 3.8.0")
endif()
Other comparison operators are VERSION_EQUAL and VERSION_GREATER.
I have a project which builds for PPC, the Toolchain is working correctly, i can build when the sysroot is installed under /opt/poky/1.5. Now i tried to move that Installation to the Project Directory (it is not a part of the Repository there, it is just installed there so it is not reliant on that fix path, so that everyone can check out the project and build it wothout setting up the sysroot under that fixed folder).
To achieve this I set CMAKE_SYSROOT to "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/poky" where the poky will be installed upon execution of a custom build script (the project also needs to build a secure image, so it is way simpler to use a build script instead of anything else, also this is convenient for jenkins).
Since the CMAKE_SYSROOT is build from the PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR which is different for the CMakeTestCCompiler Project, the cmake call fails teloling me that the CCompiler is broken of course. So I want to know, how I am supposed to get the CMakeTestCCompiler Project to compile with the same CMAKE_SYSROOT variable, without altering the CMakeTestCCompiler Project itself (of course).
Somehow I cannot find an answer anywhere, it seems that noone ever had this issue (which frankly i cannot understand, this should be a common setup in my opinion). (Or maybe i am just too much of a noob when it comes to CMAKE, which i will gladly admit)
I am not interested in solutions like: "JUST INSTALL IT IN A FIX PATH" or such... please, I need the setup like this, I have reasons for that.
THX for reading/trying/answering/helping
Have a nice day
EDIT1:
In CMakeLists.txt (top level CMakeFile so it should be used by any build):
`SET(CMAKE_SYSROOT "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/poky/sysroots")`
In ToolchainCMake (the one given to the cmake as CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE):
`SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME Linux)`
`SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION 1)`
`SET(CMAKE_SYSROOT "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/poky/sysroots")`
`SET(COMPILER_ROOT ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/poky/sysroots/i686-pokysdk-linux/usr/bin/powerpc-poky-linux-gnuspe)`
`SET(CMAKE_C_COMPILER ${COMPILER_ROOT}/powerpc-poky-linux-gnuspe-gcc)`
`SET(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER ${COMPILER_ROOT}/powerpc-poky-linux-gnuspe-g++)`
`MESSAGE("CMAKE_C_COMPILER: ${CMAKE_C_COMPILER}")`
`MESSAGE("CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER: ${CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER}")`
`MESSAGE("COMPILER_ROOT: ${COMPILER_ROOT}")`
`SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH ${SYS_ROOT}/ppce500v2-poky-linux-gnuspe)`
`SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_PROGRAM NEVER)`
`SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_LIBRARY ONLY)`
`SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_INCLUDE ONLY)`
EDIT2:
I used the
`set(CMAKE_C_COMPILER_WORKS 1 CACHE INTERNAL "")`
`set(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_WORKS 1 CACHE INTERNAL "")`
settings to simulate the CMakeTestCCompiler build succeeding and realized that I am facing some additional problems: It seem that the packages are looked up on the system instead of the CMAKE_SYSROOT folder. Even tried the
`SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH ${CMAKE_SYSROOT})`
to try to force the search in there, but without luck. In the CMakeError.log I can see, that the compiler itself was configured with the prefix option that points to /opt/poky/1.5, the path that i want to "overwrite", now I am not sure if the compiler could even deal with an alternate path.
I felt the need to add these information, they not really add to the problem at hand.
ERRORS:
I also found some errors in the above cmake:
`SET(CMAKE_SYSROOT "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/poky/sysroots")`
must be
`SET(CMAKE_SYSROOT "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/poky/sysroots/ppce500v2-poky-linux-gnuspe")`
instead and therefor the
`SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH ${SYS_ROOT}/ppce500v2-poky-linux-gnuspe)`
changes to
`SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH ${CMAKE_SYSROOT})`
EDIT: Whole answer changed.
My first suspicion was that the problem is that value of ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR} is not known in CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE as it is processed before CMakeLists.txt. But this isn't true.
I had similar problem (CMake 2.8.12.2), everything worked OK, when I passed cross compiler by CC environment variable with --sysroot option, i.e. CMake was invoked as follows:
CC="arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc --sysroot=/path/to/sysroot" cmake /path/to/sources
When I switched to using toolchain file, CMake started to report that C compiler doesn't work.
To workaround this problem, I use CMakeForceCompiler package. Parts toolchain file (along with comments) I think are relevant:
include(CMakeForceCompiler)
set(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME Linux)
set(CMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION 1)
# Force compiler - only option that actually works
cmake_force_c_compiler (${TOOLCHAIN_PATH}/bin/arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc GNU)
cmake_force_cxx_compiler(${TOOLCHAIN_PATH}/bin/arm-linux-gnueabi-g++ GNU)
# NOTE: CMAKE_SYSROOT doesn't work as expected
add_definitions("--sysroot=${TOOLCHAIN_SYSROOT}")
set(CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS "${CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS} --sysroot=${TOOLCHAIN_SYSROOT}" CACHE INTERNAL "" FORCE)
Note, that TOOLCHAIN_PATH and TOOLCHAIN_SYSROOT are my local variables set before.