It seems that most users will just use a pre build version of boost in combination with find_package.
I always download my 3rd party dependencies via git and integrate them in cmake. This was usually not a problem because all my libraries were either using cmake or were just header only libraries.
How would I integrate boost log into my cmake build system? Do I need to treat it as if I had written it myself and compile it manually by including every .h and .cpp files and build it as a shared library?
Or is there a more simple way, for example reusing the .jam file in cmake?
Related
I'm creating a very small project that depends on the following library: https://github.com/CopernicaMarketingSoftware/AMQP-CPP
I'm doing what i always do with third-party libraries: i add their git repo as a submodule, and build them along with my code:
option(COOL_LIBRARY_OPTION ON)
add_subdirectory(deps/cool-library)
include_directories(deps/cool-library/include)
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} coollib)
This has worked perfectly for libraries like Bullet, GLFW and others. However, this AMQP library does quite an ugly hack. Their include directory is called include, but in their CMake install() command, they rename it to amqpcpp. And their main header, deps/cool-library/amqpcpp.h, is referencing all other headers using that "fake" directory.
What happens is: when CMake tries to compile my sources which depend on deps/cool-library/amqpcpp.h, it fails because it's not finding deps/cool-library/amqpcpp/*.h, only deps/cool-library/include.
Does anyone have any idea how i can fix this without having to bundle the library into my codebase?
This is not how CMake is supposed to work.
CMake usually builds an entire distributive package of a library once and then installs it to some prefix path. It is then accessible for every other build process on the system by saying "find_package()". This command finds the installed distibution, and all the libs, includes etc. automagically. Whatever weird stuff library implementers did, the resulting distros are more or less alike.
So, in this case you do a lot of unnecessary work by adding includes manually. As you see it can also be unreliable.
What you can do is:
to still have all the dependencies source distributions in submodules (usually people don't bother doing this though)
build and install each dependency package into another (.gitignored) folder within the project or outside by using their own CMakeLists.txt. Let's say with a custom build step in your CMakeLists.txt
use "find_package()" in your CMakeLists.txt when build your application
Two small addition to Drop's answer: If the library set up their install routines correctly, you can use find_package directly on the library's binary tree, skipping the install step. This is mostly useful when you make changes to both the library and the dependent project, as you don't have to run the INSTALL target everytime to make library changes available downstream.
Also, check out the ExternalProject module of CMake which is very convenient for having external dependencies being built automatically as part of your project. The general idea is that you still pull in the library's source as a submodule, but instead of using add_subdirectory to pull the source into your project, you use ExternalProject_Add to build it on its own and then just link against it from your project.
I built the boost library in order to use the boost functions split and format.
I noticed that the split placed under the algorithm directory, but there is no library named 'algorithm' when I run --show-libraries to get the list of libraries.
When I built the whole boost, I didn't find which lib file to add to my project (I don't want to add the all the libs and headers).
How can I build this specific library?
Both boost::algorithm and boost::format are header only, so no need to build.
You will find both header files inside the include/boost/ folder:
include/boost/algorithm/algorithm.hpp
include/boost/format.hpp
When running bootstrap with --show-libraries:
The Boost libraries requiring separate building and installation are:
The algorithm library isn't listed and is even template for the STL equivalent -> header-only.
How can I use libcurl with my project without actually installing it or curl on the system?
I want to make my source-code portable, so that any developer can copy the folder with all sources and other files, run make and compile the program without the need for system level installations.
I am looking for (probably separate) solutions for Linux and for Windows (dll?). If it is possible, provide some standard/official solution and not hack (I'd like to be educated about linking third party libraries)
I've used it on Windows using Visual Studio, all you need to do under Windows:
Download the source
Using CMake generate the project files (when using Visual Studio).
Build the libraries, 3 files will be built: libcurl.lib, libcurl_imp.lib and libcurl.dll
Include curl.h in your project and add the paths to your .lib files
Build your program, put libcurl.dll in the executable folder and it will work.
On Linux it should be a similar process, build the libraries and include them with your source.
You probably want to build a static library out of libcurl and link agains it. Should be pretty straightforward and the process is almost identical on every OS.
I recently downloaded http://boost-log.sourceforge.net/libs/log/doc/html/index.html but I can't seem to find out how to build it. The rest of my boost lib was installed by using the installer, so all I did was selecting the files I wanted to include.
So how do I build Logs? Building for windows is completely new to me and I would really appreciate any help!
EDIT
Merge boost.log in the boost directory structure first.
Did you build boost ? If not, you have to go to your boost directory, run boostrap.sh and then run b2.exe. That will build all boost libraries.
Since you are on Windows, boost supports automatic linking, i.e. you just include the header files and the required libraries will be linked automatically when building your project from Visual Studio.
I've been working on various open-source projects, which involve the following C++ libraries (& others):
MuPDF
Boost
FreeType
GTKmm
hummus PDF libraries
LibTiff
LibXML2
Wt xpdf
xpdf
Poppler
ZLib
It often takes a long time to configure these libraries, when setting them up on a clean machine. Is there a way to automate the grabbing of all dependencies on a windows machine?
The closest I've found is CMake, which checks to make sure you have the dependencies installed/extracted before generating your project files. But I haven't found anything for Windows which can parse the list of dependencies and then download+install the required versions.
Please recommend a package manager for Windows with up-to-date C++ libraries.
Vcpkg, a Microsoft open source project, helps you get C and C++ libraries on Windows.
Take a look at the Hunter package manager when you already use CMake to setup your project. It automatically downloads and builds your dependencies whith only a few lines of extra cmake code. Hunter is based on cmake export and import targets.
For example if you want to use the GoogleTest library in your cmake based project you would add the following lines to your root CMakeLists.txt
# file root CMakeLists.txt
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.0)
# To get hunter you need to download and include a single cmake file
# see documentation for correct name
include("../gate.cmake")
project(download-gtest)
# set the location of all your hunter-packages
set( HUNTER_ROOT_DIR C:/CppLibraries/HunterLibraries )
# This call automaticall downloads and compiles gtest the first time
# cmake is executed. The library is then cached in the HUNTER_ROOT_DIR
hunter_add_package(GTest)
# Now the GTest library can be found and linked to by your own project
find_package(GTest CONFIG REQUIRED)
add_executable(foo foo.cpp)
target_link_libraries(foo GTest::main)
Not all the libraries you list are available as "hunter-packages" but the project is open source so you can create hunter-packages for your dependencies and commit them to the project. Here is a list of libraries that are already available as hunter packages.
This will not solve all your problems out of the box because you have to create hunter-packages for your dependencies. But the existing framework already does a lot of the work and it is better to use that instead of having a half-assed selfmade solution.
Biicode is a new dependency manager for C++. It also has a few libraries that you listed. Biicode automatically scans your source files for dependencies, downloads and builds them. See here for a very cool example that includes Freeglut.
What I've found:
Closest thing to what I'm looking for:
NuGET
Unfortunately it doesn't have any of the libraries I require in its repository.
So I ended getting most of the libraries from the KDE4windows project and custom building the rest.
Npackd is a package manager for Windows. There is a default repository for C++ libraries and also a third party repository for Visual Studio 2010 64 bit libraries. Boost and zlib are already in the default repository. If you decide to use Npackd, you could file an issue if you need other libraries.
Windows does not have a package manager. Go to the libraries' website and download the Windows builds if they provide any.
There are some alternatives, but not without drawbacks:
Cygwin: provides a nice package manager, but all binaries are built for Cygwin, which means they run slower than their native equivalent, any apps using them will link to the Cygwin DLL, and you're stuck with that license. Also the use of the native Win32 API is sometimes troublesome due to incompatibility with the POSIX emulation offered. Only for GCC.
MinGW-get: is a package manager for the MinGW.org compiler. These are native Win32 binaries, but only for use with MinGW's GCC.
There is no package manager or slightly equivalent thing for anything Visual Studio or MinGW-w64 related.
There is no package management on Windows. On Windows developers typically use full-blown everything-and-the-kitchen-sink development environments and produce monolithic applications themselves, shipped with all dependencies.