So I'm using CMake for a project.
It consists of a set of shared libraries linked to one executable. All are generated in the project (there are no external targets). Each sub project lives in its own directory, with its own cmakelists file.
So I make an out-of-source build, taking care to set CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to Debug, and run cmake, and then make. I use GNU make 3.81, GCC 4.8.1, binutils 2.23.2 and CMake 3.2.3 on a Windows box using MSYS/MINGW.
The problem is that, when I load this executable in gdb (version 7.6), place a breakpoint on a function from one of the shared libraries, and then try to single step, gdb skips the whole function saying it has no line number information.
According to my understanding, line number information is a part of the debugging information, so I expected this to be generated during the compiling process (as per the CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE) which it didn't, so I would like to know how I can get CMake to generate this line number information properly (that is, without manually adding compiler-specific options in the cmake files, although I would take that if it's the only solution).
I've tried setting CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE from the command line (when invoking the cmake utility), inside the cmakelists, and even by modifying the CMakeCache.txt, and restarting the build from an empty directory with no success. I then made sure that CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE was effectively set to Debug by using the MESSAGE command to print it's value, and it was correctly set to Debug. So then I executed 'make VERBOSE=1' to see if the correct compiler option was added, and found it correctly used the "-g" option (although I would have expected -ggdb, but more on this later). The cmake documentation and Google did not bring me any answers.
My hypothesis is that the -g option only generates basic debugging information (such as the mappings between functions and their memory addresses, and how to access their arguments) whereas -ggdb would generate more in-detail debugging information in a gdb-specific format, including said line number informations), but a troubling fact is that, when running the executable in gdb, functions defined inside the executable do have line number information, only the shared libraries don't, hence my confusion.
Related
I have an embedded project (using ESP-IDF which builds projects with CMake), where I have a props.json file that contains several settings (e.g. "device type"). For example based on the actual value of "deviceType" the CMake open and read props.json by calling execute_process() and jq, then defines C preprocessor macros, such as: DEVICE_TYPE_A by using add_compile_definitions().
The problem is that, this will run only when I modify the CMakeLists.txt or clean the whole project, but I don't want to recompile each components when I change the props.json only the files that I wrote (so, depend on the settings). I'd like to make CMake read the file each time I build the project without cleaning it.
I did my research, so I know there are add_custom_target() and add_custom_command() that behave that way, however add_compile_definitions() cannot be called in a script. Is there a solution to achieve this or should I just use a header file configured by configure_file() and leave add_compile_definitions() alone?
This is actually pretty easy and you don't need to manually reconfigure CMake. Just add the following to the CMakeLists.txt in the directory containing your props.json file:
set_property(DIRECTORY . APPEND PROPERTY CMAKE_CONFIGURE_DEPENDS props.json)
This will add props.json to the list of files that the CMake-generated build scans when determining whether to re-run the CMake configure step. See the docs on CMAKE_CONFIGURE_DEPENDS for more detail.
In general, you should never need to manually re-run CMake1 after the first configure. If you do, it is an indication that you have not communicated all of the necessary information for CMake to generate a correct build system.
1 There is one notable exception: Xcode is known to be buggy when re-running the CMake configure step automatically.
My goal was to see details about an invocation of g++ called directly by cmake from the command line. I do not care about the output of make for the purposes of this question.
According to the official FAQ and the accepted answer on a related question, I should make sure CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON is set in my generated CMakeCache.txt, by e.g. passing the commandline flag -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON. When I did that it re-queried a bunch of properties, but gave no extra information about the invocation.
However, calling cmake with the flag --verbose=1 showed me exactly what I needed.
What are these two options doing differently? Is --verbose=1 deprecated or otherwise discouraged?
No, that's not what the accepted answer and the CMake FAQ you link say, otherwise I would be surprised.
Precisely, they don't say that you should modify CMakeCache.txt. Don't modify that file, it's not a good practice, since one can easily make mistakes.
If you instead have followed exactly what both sources say, i.e.
cmake -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON .
make
or
cmake .
make VERBOSE=1
you would have seen a verbose output from the compilation and linking phases.
Alternatively, you should achieve the same effect if you put in your CMakeLists.txt file the following line:
set( CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE on )
The fact that you do not see output in one of the cases might due to previously cached configurations.
I suggest you do if possible out-of-source builds so that in this case you can get rid of every CMake generated files and directories by just removing the build directory.
Then you could just recreate new configurations without interference from previously generated configurations and build files.
Of course, I might be wrong and you hit a bug, but it seems unlikely.
EDIT: That's because in the configuration phase you're not compiling, i.e. you are not using a Makefile, which is what the command line option set. It's not a verbose option for the cmake command itself at any stage (configuration, compiling, installing) of the project build. It will not show extra configuration info when you do cmake . but it should show you extra information when you run the make.
So CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE is the wrong option to set if you want to get verbose output from CMake itself.
After running the cmake command once to generate a build system, when, if ever, should I rerun the cmake command?
The generated build systems can detect changes in the associated CMakeLists.txt files and behave accordingly. You can see the logic for doing so in generated Makefiles. The exact rules for when this will happen successfully are mysterious to me.
When should I rerun cmake? Does the answer depend on the generator used?
This blog post (under heading: "Invoking CMake multiple times") points out the confusion over this issue and states that the answer is actually 'never', regardless of generator, but I find that surprising. Is it true?
The answer is simple:
The cmake binary of course needs to re-run each time you make changes to any build setting, but you wont need to do it by design; hence "never" is correct regarding commands you have to issue.
The build targets created by cmake automatically include checks for each file subsequently [=starting from the main CMakeLists.txt file] involved or included generating the current set of Makefiles/VS projects/whatever. When invoking make (assuming unix here) this automatically triggers a previous execution of cmake if necessary; so your generated projects include logic to invoke cmake itself! As all command-line parameters initially passed (e.g. cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE .. will be stored in the CMakeCache.txt, you dont need to re-specify any of those on subsequent invocations, which is why the projects also can just run cmake and know it still does what you intended.
Some more detail:
CMake generates book-keeping files containing all files that were involved in Makefile/Project generation, see e.g. these sample contents of my <binary-dir>/CMakeFiles/Makefile.cmake file using MSYS makefiles:
# The top level Makefile was generated from the following files:
set(CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS
"CMakeCache.txt"
"C:/Program Files (x86)/CMake/share/cmake-3.1/Modules/CMakeCCompiler.cmake.in"
"C:/Program Files (x86)/CMake/share/cmake-3.1/Modules/RepositoryInfo.txt.in"
"<my external project bin dir>/release/ep_tmp/IRON-cfgcmd.txt.in"
"../CMakeFindModuleWrappers/FindBLAS.cmake"
"../CMakeFindModuleWrappers/FindLAPACK.cmake"
"../CMakeLists.txt"
"../CMakeScripts/CreateLocalConfig.cmake"
"../Config/Variables.cmake"
"../Dependencies.cmake"
"CMakeFiles/3.1.0/CMakeCCompiler.cmake"
"CMakeFiles/3.1.0/CMakeRCCompiler.cmake")
Any modification to any of these files will trigger another cmake run whenever you choose to start a build of a target. I honestly dont know how fine-grained those dependencies tracking goes in CMake, i.e. if a target will just be build if any changes somewhere else wont affect the target's compilation. I wouldn't expect it as this can get messy quite quickly, and repeated CMake runs (correctly using the Cache capabilities) are very fast anyways.
The only case where you need to re-run cmake is when you change the compiler after you started a project(MyProject); but even this case is handled by newer CMake versions automatically now (with some yelling :-)).
additional comment responding to comments:
There are cases where you will need to manually re-run cmake, and that is whenever you write your configure scripts so badly that cmake cannot possibly detect files/dependencies you're creating. A typical scenario would be that your first cmake run creates files using e.g. execute_process and you would then include them using file(GLOB ..). This is BAD style and the CMake Docs for file explicitly say
Note: We do not recommend using GLOB to collect a list of source files from your source tree. If no CMakeLists.txt file changes when a source is added or removed then the generated build system cannot know when to ask CMake to regenerate.
Btw this comment also sheds light on the above explained self-invocation by the generated build system :-)
The "proper" way to treat this kind of situations where you create source files during configure time is to use add_custom_command(OUTPUT ...), so that CMake is "aware" of a file being generated and tracks changes correctly. If for some reason you can't/won't use add_custom_command, you can still let CMake know of your file generation using the source file property GENERATED. Any source file with this flag set can be hard-coded into target source files and CMake wont complain about missing files at configure time (and expects this file to be generated some time during the (first!) cmake run.
Looking into this topic for reading the version information from a debian/changelog file (generation phase), I ran in the topic that cmake execution should be triggered as debian/changelog is modified. So I had the need to add debian/changelog to CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS.
In my case, debian/changelog is read through execute_process. Execute_process unfortunately gives no possibility to add files processed to CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS. But I found that running configure_file will do it. Actually I am really missing something like DEPENDENCIES in execute_process.
However, as I had the need to configure the debian/changelog file for my needs, the solution came implicitly to me.
I actually also found a hint about this in the official documentation of configure_file:
"If the input file is modified the build system will re-run CMake to re-configure the file and generate the build system again."
So using configure_file should be a safe to trigger the re-run of cmake.
From a user perspective, I would expect other commands to extend CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS, too. E.g. execute_process (on demand) but also file(READ) (implicitly like configure_file). Perhaps there are others. Each read file is likely to influence the generation phase. As an alternative it would be nice to have a command to just extend the dependency list (hint for the cmake developers, perhaps one comes along).
I am currently having a bear of a time trying to compile a moderate sized library with a brand new toolchain, Assimp on Xcode6 with the new iOS 8.0 SDK.
Bundled with the project are various scripts and Xcode projects that have configurations for building on iOS, but unfortunately none of them work out of the box.
So far the farthest I have gotten is by using a build script which uses the cmake "Unix Makefiles" method to assemble static libs. Other methods would include using cmake to generate Xcode projects to use to build. I tried that also to no avail, and neither did the Xcodeproject that comes with the project in the repository (which I later learned was marked deprecated in one of the readme files).
Okay, so with this "Unix Makefiles" cmake script I have been able to generate some of the static libs (after manually forcing static lib generation inside the main CMakeLists.txt), but when it went on to build for i386 and x86_64 architectures for iPhoneSimulator it kept pulling in the headers for iOS which caused a torrent of compiler errors.
Luckily I followed a hunch and found assimp/code/CMakeFiles/assimp.dir/flags.make which is one of the cmake-generated files, and lo and behold, the entire cflags was in here, and once I removed the rogue header include path, the make call finally succeeds and I have my iPhoneSimulator static lib!
Okay so the question that I have is basically where do I get started when debugging these frustrating cmake problems. My relationship with cmake has always been a strained one because none of cmake's complexity and design principles ever made sense to me, and very infrequent are the times when cmake builds work for me out of the box... it is always something that almost works but then I have to spend hours debugging with make VERBOSE=1 and then haphazardly poking at generated files, which are of course all marked with warnings to not edit them as they are generated files.
I realize that some of the variables here are perhaps relevant to my troubles. But it isn't clear to me how I can debug these variables. Where do I go to print out these variables so that I can find which variable contains erroneous values? For example, in this most recent situation I had a -I flag that was cropping up in the wrong place. Luckily I was able to find a file that contained it using various large-hammer methods that involve grep but I am not close to actually fixing the build configuration to make the process any less painful in the future.
For complex CMakeLists.txt files I have found the variable_watch command can sometimes be useful (documentation here). It doesn't make it easy, but gives you another level of information.
I'm attempting to debug a command line CMake failure. The same CMake file works in Qt Creator, with the arguments in the Qt Creator window matching what I have entered on the command line.
This makes me think Qt Creator is adding some extra arguments, which makes sense since the generator drop down has several options that specify architecture and CMake version.
Is there a way to get the CMake command that Qt Creator executed to produce the desired result, specifically the arguments passed to the CMake executable?
I found one post that talks about viewing the CMakeCache files to do some forensics, but this only proves there are differences, it doesn't quickly show me what arguments to change.
Try adding the following block to the end of your CMakeLists.txt and running CMake from Qt Creator again. The CMake output should list all variables that have been passed via the -D command line argument.
get_cmake_property(CacheVars CACHE_VARIABLES)
foreach(CacheVar ${CacheVars})
get_property(CacheVarHelpString CACHE ${CacheVar} PROPERTY HELPSTRING)
if(CacheVarHelpString STREQUAL "No help, variable specified on the command line.")
get_property(CacheVarType CACHE ${CacheVar} PROPERTY TYPE)
if(CacheVarType STREQUAL "UNINITIALIZED")
set(CacheVarType)
else()
set(CacheVarType :${CacheVarType})
endif()
set(CMakeArgs "${CMakeArgs} -D${CacheVar}${CacheVarType}=\"${${CacheVar}}\"")
endif()
endforeach()
message("CMakeArgs: ${CMakeArgs}")
For more info, see this answer.
This won't show what generator was selected (if any) via the -G arg. To find that, you need to look for CMAKE_GENERATOR:INTERNAL=... in your CMakeCache.txt
If this doesn't help you identify the overall problem, you should probably heed #arrowdodger's advice and post more details about the errors you're getting and your two build environments. For example, an error could be caused simply by running CMake from a subdirectory of the source tree.