CMake find_package: where did it find the package? - cmake

In my CMake package, there is a call to find_package. This succeeds, great! However, it turns out to be the wrong version of the package. I now want to go and delete that package. However, I have no idea where the heck it is on my system, nor where the -config.cmake file is that CMake must have found somewhere. Is there a way to get find_package to give me this information? Or at least verbosely tell me where it is searching?
I though this might be in the variable CMAKE_MODULE_PATH, however that is empty for me. So I guess it is in the default paths somewhere. But CMake searches a lot of places for packages, and I didn't find it in the usual locations that I remember.

Ah ok, I found a solution here:
https://riptutorial.com/cmake/example/21128/debug-find-package---errors
Turns out there is a special debug flag to make find_package tell you where it is searching:
cmake -D CMAKE_FIND_DEBUG_MODE=ON ..

As of CMake 3.17, the cmake command line has native support for printing the search directories for all of the CMake find_* commands. Use the --debug-find flag:
cmake --debug-find ..

Related

Obtaining Vcpkg paths within a CMake script

Is there a simple way to find either the root, or the "installed" subdirectory of Microsoft's Vcpkg, from within a CMake build script? Let's assume the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE has already been set to the standard vcpkg.cmake file.
You most likely need to set an environment variable to tell CMake where to find the toolchain file.
Possible answer: Call cmake with -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=%VCPKG_ROOT%\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake

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.

pkg_check_modules cannot find *.pc.cmake

I am using a 3rd party library rbdl, which contains rbdl.pc.cmake, which 'I suppose' is included for using pkg_check_modules in a cmake file.
I update PKG_CONFIG_PATH to point at the rbdl folder
set(ENV{PKG_CONFIG_PATH} "$ENV{PKG_CONFIG_PATH}:${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/externals/rbdl")
pkg_check_modules(RBDL rbdl)
but pkg_check_modules says it cannot find the module.
When I manually duplicate rbdl.pc.cmake, rename the copy into rbdl.pc and run pkg-config --cflags --libs rbdl in terminal, then my cmake also start working!
Interestingly, now even if I delete rbdl.pc, rbdl module if perfectly found by rbdl.pc.cmake!
So my questions are:
What is the difference between *.pc and *.pc.cmake?
How do I correctly setup my cmake to work with original rbdl.pc.cmake?
Why rbdl.pc.cmake starts to be accepted by pkg_check_modules after that tweak with duplicating it, renaming the copy and running pkg-config manually?
You understand it wrong! rbdl.pc.cmake is just a template file. It is not supposed to be used by you! Take a look into CMakeLists.txt line 160 -- configure_file() used to render variables ("quoted" by # in template file) and produce a rbdl.pc (a real pkg-config) file. Latter should be installed (some way) and then will be available to pkg-config hence can be used in your project.
pkg-config is stupid do not interpret or validate compiler/linker flags any way, so your renamed file "works" (yeah, producing invalid command line for compiler/linker).
I wish you to read CMake documentation before trying to code something using it! It'll save your time and give you a necessary knowledge which stops you from doing stupid things like you described in your question ;-)

Add temporarily path to pkg-config within CMake script?

For external libraries the user can specify a non-standard location by adding the path to the CMAKE_FLAGS or by adding -DMYLIB_ROOT. Within the CMake script I want to find the library's pkg-config pc file. Because the pc file is not in the standard folder, it is not found by pkg-config with FindPkgConfig's pkg_search_module.
I tried to add the user-given path to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH but it seemed to be ignored:
include(FindPkgConfig)
set(PKG_CONFIG_PATH "${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}:${MYLIB_ROOT}/lib/pkgconfig")
pkg_search_module(PKG_MYLIB mylib)
if(${PKG_MYLIB_FOUND})
...
When I call pkg-config from the terminal with the modified PKG_CONFIG_PATH set, it find the pc file. What am I doing wrong? How can I get pkg_search_module working? I'd like to avoid calling pkg-config directly from CMake.
Maybe the following will do the job
set( ENV{PKG_CONFIG_PATH} "$ENV{PKG_CONFIG_PATH}:${MYLIB_ROOT}/lib/pkgconfig" )
This is a known issue and a ticket exists in CMake's bugtracker, but it is backlocked due to lack of developer interest. I guess one has to provide a patch first...
Edit: According to the bugtracker the feature has been implemented and is part of CMake 3.1.

How to get CMake to build a Fortran program with MPI support?

I was trying to parallelize a Fortran program using MPI. I use CMake to do the build of my program. It was difficult to find support on getting CMake to create a working makefile for Fortran with MPI support on google, but from what I could gather, I added the following commands to my CMakeLists.txt script:
find_package(MPI REQUIRED)
add_definitions(${MPI_Fortran_COMPILE_FLAGS})
include_directories(${MPI_Fortran_INCLUDE_DIRS})
link_directories(${MPI_FortranLIBRARY_DIRS})
This will locate MPI on my system and then set the variables found in the following three commands. In my linking line, I added the MPI libraries variable to the list of the other libraries that my program needed to build.
target_link_libraries(${exe_name} otherlibs ${MPI_FortranLIBRARY_DIRS})
Doing cmake and then make worked to build the program and the program ran; however, when I tried to add more to the source which required me to include the mpif.h include file, my compilation failed due to not being able to find this header file. I also could not use mpi because the compiler cannot find the mpi.mod file in the path.
I inserted "message" commands into my CMakeLists.txt file and printed out the values of the variables that I was using for including and linking. It turns out that the variables, MPI_Fortran_INCLUDE_DIRS and MPI_FortranLIBRARY_DIRS weren't set to anything. A check of the module that CMake is actually using to set these variables (FindMPI.cmake) showed these variables to be non-existent. I changed my CMakeLists.txt file to use the correct variables:
find_package(MPI REQUIRED)
add_definitions(${MPI_Fortran_COMPILE_FLAGS})
include_directories(${MPI_Fortran_INCLUDE_PATH})
link_directories(${MPI_Fortran_LIBRARIES})
target_link_libraries(${exe_name} otherlibs ${MPI_Fortran_LIBRARIES})
Now when I execute make, the compiler could find both mpif.h as well as mpi.mod.
UPDATE:
I want to mention that this solution worked for cmake version 2.8.10.1. When I moved my CMakeLists.txt scripts to a different machine that has cmake version 2.8.4, I get the same error about mpi.mod missing during the link stage. I checked the FindMPI.cmake module and, sure enough, there are no variables that specify the language (i.e. there is no MPI_Fortran_LIBRARIES variable, just a MPI_LIBRARIES variable, and this variable is not getting set to the correct location of the mpi library on that system. So this solution will be dependent on cmake version.
Sounds like you are not using the mpi compiler. That is fine, but you have to add a lot of flags then. There is not really an mpi compiler but a wrapper that sets the flags to be able to use mpi. With cmake I was able to do this by defining the fortran compiler I was going to use BEFORE the call to cmake. It's not a nice solution since you loose portability, but it works. I'm trying to find a better solution and define inside cmake what compiler to use, but have not been able to do so. In other words, this works for me:
FC=mpif90 cmake ../.
make
I was having the same problem as you. Hope this solves the issue. If anybody finds how to define the fortran compiler INSIDE cmake please post it!
as you've already noticed, you misspelled the name of two variables, namely MPI_Fortran_LIBRARIES and MPI_Fortran_LIBRARIES
It is useful also to add:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.10)
at the very beginning of your CMake to be sure that these variables will be defined.