Question

I am using CMake 2.8.8 and the ExternalProject module. CMake retrieves the project’s source files and builds them correctly (resulting in project.a and project.so files on unix). I want to always go with the dynamic library. How can I do that and still be cross platform?

I tried

list(
    APPEND foo_LIBRARIES
    ${binary_dir}/${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_PREFIXES}project${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES}
)

but that does not work because {CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES} is a list of .a;.so.

list(
    APPEND foo_LIBRARIES
    ${binary_dir}/${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_PREFIXES}project.so
)

works, but only on unix systems. Is there a clean way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Given that for WIN32 the ${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES} is just .lib, you could do something like:

set(ProjectSuffix ${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES})
list(REMOVE_ITEM ProjectSuffix .a)
list(APPEND foo_LIBRARIES
    ${binary_dir}/${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_PREFIXES}project${ProjectSuffix})