Question

I am developing two libraries A and B with B depending on A, both managed in their own Git repositories. The libraries are built with CMake and installed in standard UNIX directories. During installation a .pc file is also installed that is used by pkg-config. Library B uses pkg-config to find library A, therefore it is necessary that either library A is installed system-wide with make install or the PKG_CONFIG_PATH is set to the appropriate directory.

Now, I use Jenkins to build library A on a remote machine. Unfortunately, library B cannot be built because the dependency is not met (pkg-config cannot find library A). Setting the paths in a pre-build step is not working because the commands are run in its own shell.

The questions are

• Can I somehow make install library A? Or,
• can I somehow point CMake to /var/lib/jenkins/jobs/libA/install_dir/lib?
• Is there a better way to build projects with inter-dependent libraries?

Answer 1

Using artifacts, as suggested by user1013341, is one of the steps that was needed to this problem. But to get it working with pkg-config we have to do a little bit more:

1. I setup library A’s CMakeLists.txt to produce a tarball with make package_source.
2. After a successful build of library A, Jenkins create this tarball and stores it as an artifact.
3. library B uses the Copy Artifact Plugin to get the tarball and untars it. Inside of the tarball there is still built project and the .pc file pointing to the install location of library A.
4. In the next build step, I use the EnvInject Plugin to set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the untarred library A.
5. Last but not least, the normal CMake build process can be started and the correct paths are picked up according to the environment variables.