Is --cmake-force-configure a cmake option? - cmake

In a build script I have, I found --cmake-force-configure being passed as option to CMake. I don't find documentation for that, only on ROS forums as option for colcon. Is --cmake-force-configure a valid option for CMake?? If not, how to emulate what it is supposed to do (force CMake to execute the configure step)

Is --cmake-force-configure a cmake option?
No.
Is --cmake-force-configure a valid option for CMake?
No.
If not, how to emulate what it is supposed to do (force CMake to execute the configure step)
Run cmake configure step again.
The thread you found starts with What is the use of the following arguments to ****colcon build****?. It is an option for colcon build.

Related

Building a CMake library within a Bazel project

I've written a module on top of a private fork off of TensorFlow that uses nanomsg.
For my local development server, I used cmake install to install nanomsg (to /usr/local) and accessed the header files from their installed location. The project runs fine locally.
However, I now need to package nanomsg within my TensorFlow workspace. I've tried the following two approaches, and find neither satisfactory:
Similar to this answer for OpenCV, I precompiled nanomsg into a private repository, loaded it within my workspace (within tensorflow/workspace.bzl) using an http_archive directive then included the headers and libraries in the relevant build script. This runs fine, but is not a portable solution.
A more portable solution, I created a genrule to run a specific sequence of cmake commands that can be used to build nanomsg. This approach is neater, but the genrule cannot be reused to cmake other projects. (I referred to this discussion).
Clearly cmake is not supported as a first-class citizen in Bazel builds. Is there anyone who has faced this problem in your own projects created a generic, portable way to include libraries within Bazel projects that are built using cmake? If so, how did you approach it?
As Ulf wrote, I think your suggested option 2 should work fine.
Regarding "can I identify if the cmake fails", yes: cmake should return with an error exit code (!= 0) when it fails. This in turn will cause Bazel to automatically recognize the genrule action as failed and thus fail the build. Because Bazel sets "set -e -o pipefail" before running your command (cf. https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/be/general.html#genrule-environment), it should also work if you chain multiple cmake commands in your genrule "cmd".
If you call out to a shell script in your "cmd" attribute that then actually runs the cmake commands, make sure to put "set -e -o pipefail" in the first line of your script yourself. Otherwise the script will not fail when cmake fails.
If I misunderstood your question "Can I identify if the cmake fails", please let me know. :)
This new project: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_foreign_cc seems like a solution(it build rules for cmake to build your project inside bazel).

Is it possible to alter CMAKE_MODULE_PATH from CMake commandline?

Edit: The accepted answer actually shows that it is pretty normally possible to set CMAKE_MODULE_PATH as any other CMake variable e.g. via the -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH path CLI parameter. It seems that in my case there is some included CMake script that calls set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH /library_path), which erases all previous paths set to the variable. That's why I couldn't get the variable to do what I wanted it to do. I'll leave the question here in case anybody else faces this kind of situation.
I'm building a (3rd party) project that uses the Protobuf library (but this question is general). My system has a system-wide install of a newer version of Protobuf than the project is compatible with. So I've downloaded and compiled from source an older version of Protobuf.
The project uses CMake, and in its CMakeLists.txt, there is:
find_package(Protobuf REQUIRED)
Which, however, finds the (incompatible) system install. Of course, CMake doesn't know about my custom build of Protobuf. But how do I tell it?
I've created a FindProtobuf.cmake file in, say, ~/usr/share/cmake-3.0/Modules/ and want the build process to use this one for finding Protobuf. But I haven't succeeded forcing CMake to pick up this one and not the system one. I think the reason is quite obvious from the CMake docs of find_package:
The command has two modes by which it searches for packages: “Module” mode and “Config” mode. Module mode is available when the command is invoked with the above reduced signature. CMake searches for a file called Find<package>.cmake in the CMAKE_MODULE_PATH followed by the CMake installation. If the file is found, it is read and processed by CMake. ... If no module is found and the MODULE option is not given the command proceeds to Config mode.
So until I succeed to change CMAKE_MODULE_PATH, CMake will just pick up the FindProtobuf.cmake installed to the default system path and won't ever proceed to the "Config" mode where I could probably make use of CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH.
It's important for me to not edit the CMakeLists.txt since it belongs to a 3rd party project I don't maintain.
What I've tried (all without success):
calling CMAKE_MODULE_PATH=~/usr/share/cmake-3.0/Modules cmake ... (the env. variable is not "transferred" to the CMake variable with the same name)
calling cmake -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH=~/usr/share/cmake-3.0/Modules ... (doesn't work, probably by design?)
calling Protobuf_DIR=path/to/my/protobuf cmake ... (the project doesn't support this kind of override for Protobuf)
It seems to me that, unfortunately, the only way to alter the CMAKE_MODULE_PATH used by find_package is to alter it from within CMakeLists.txt, which is exactly what I want to avoid.
Do you have any ideas/workarounds on how not to touch the CMakeLists.txt and still convince find_package to find my custom Protobuf?
For reference, the CMake part of this project is on github .
As a direct answer to your question, yes, you can set CMAKE_MODULE_PATH at the command line by running cmake -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH=/some/path -S /path/to/src -B /path/to/build.
But that probably doesn't do what you want it to do; see below.
The Bitbucket link you supplied is dead, but here are a few suggestions that might help.
Avoid writing your own find modules, especially when the upstream supplies CMake config modules.
You can direct CMake to your custom Protobuf installation by setting one of CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH or Protobuf_ROOT (v3.12+) to the Protobuf install root.
You can tell find_package to try CONFIG mode first by setting CMAKE_FIND_PACKAGE_PREFER_CONFIG to true (v3.15+). Then set Protobuf_DIR to the directory containing ProtobufConfig.cmake.
Failing all else, you can manually set the variables documented in CMake's own FindProtobuf module, here: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/module/FindProtobuf.html
All these variables can be set at the configure command line with the -D flag.
There are very few environment variables that populate CMake variables to start and I would avoid relying on them. There is an exhaustive list here: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-env-variables.7.html. CMAKE_MODULE_PATH is not among them.

CMake add depedency to the install target

I've got the following problem using cmake. I use UseDoxygen from http://tobias.rautenkranz.ch/cmake/doxygen/ to generate the documentation for my library. This works fine, but know I want to realize the following:
When I call "make install" I want to build to Documentation and install it too. Therefore I add
install(DIRECTORY ${DOXYFILE_OUTPUT_DIR}/${DOXYFILE_HTML_DIR} DESTINATION share/doc/mylib/)
add_dependencies(install doc)
to my CMakeLists.txt.
This results in an error:
CMake Error at CMakeModules/UseDoxygen.cmake:145 (add_dependencies):
add_dependencies Adding dependency to non-existent target: install
Call Stack (most recent call first):
CMakeLists.txt:141 (include)
Is it possible to get a easy workaround for this? Because if the targets are not connected the install step installs nothing unless "make doc" is done manually befor calling "make install".
regards
Grisu
We build our documentation by adding it with add_custom_target with the ALL option specified so it builds with the all target.
Then to install, it's just the install command. There is no need to add anything to the install target.
If you add the documentation to the all target, then doing make install will also build the documentation.
If you generate code documentation, isn't it a better idea to execute that command after the build command? In this way it will be available at install time.
You can add a custom command at POST_BUILD and execute the doxygen commands there. See more at http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/cmake-2-8-docs.html#command:add_custom_command
Building documentation via add_custom_target( ALL ...) is not an ideal solution, as it means the documentation gets built redundantly for all configurations (Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo, MinSizeRel).
I'd like to build the documentation once regardless of the build config, then use the CONFIGURATIONS option of the install() command to install it only for the Release and RelWithDebInfo configs. install() should depend on the documentation target but, as I said, only build it for one config. There doesn't appear to be an way to add a dependency from install() onto the documentation that meets these requirements.

CMake Header Generator Updates

In CMake I currently have a simple Python script to generate a header, but if I update the script itself CMake won't re-run the script. Is there a way I can get CMake to do this?
It seems you are directly invoking your code generation script when cmake is run. While it is possible solution but it is definitely not a right way to use code generators with cmake.
I recommend you to use add_custom_command for your case:
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT generated.h
COMMAND ${PYTHON_EXECUTABLE} generator.py
DEPENDS generator.py
)
And next you can simple put your header to the list of source files passed to add_library/add_executable commands. cmake will automatically track all the dependencies and invoke your script.
Term DEPENDS generator.py informs cmake that it should regenerate header if script is changed.
With this approach file generated.h will be generated only at build time (when you run make or execute a build command in IDE). In contrast if you are running your script at cmake time (with execute_process command) then you have to rerun cmake to regenerate your file. Which is possible but you need to use some tricks to introduce a non-standard dependency.

CMake Configure File Build Rule

I'm using CMake for my build system and in the project, we will have a bunch of configuration files. Some of them will just need to be copied over, some will need to be modified per computer. I'm currently using CMake's "configure_file" command to copy/replace parts of the file. This works great, and I love how I can use any variable from CMake in the configure routine.
But if you change the original file, CMake will not pick this up and you have to rerun cmake for it to configure the directory. When I run "make", I want it to pick up that I've changed the file and rerun configure.
It will also reconfigure files always, even if the file it is overwriting is newer. I want it to act like a custom target.
I think I can do this with add_custom_command, but I don't think I can run a CMake command from add_custom_command. So is there anyway to duplicate the behaviour that configure_file does in CMake?
I recently upgraded to CMake 2.8. It seems like it automatically has the exact behavior I wanted.
I do not think this has an easy answer. I see two options:
To trigger a re-run of cmake if an input changes, you might be able to make your input file depend on CMakeLists.txt.
To run a cmake command as part of and add_custom_command, there is the variable ${CMAKE_COMMAND}, which will give you the path to the running cmake. You could, as part of the configure step, generate a fragment of CMake code (that calls configure_file) that is invoked using the -P option. Either pass substitutions on the command line using -D, or write them to the CMake fragment.