CMake link stage question

Question

I am currently building a rather large application, using cmake to generate cross platform build scripts. During this process of putting together the cmake build scripts, I have discovered the pain of gcc link line ordering.

The basic issues is that including static libraries in the wrong order leads to unused library symbols being thrown away that then cannot be found by subsequent dependent libraries.

Thus, I am in the situation where cmake generates a visual studios build system that compiles just fine, but the unix makefiles throw all kinds of "undefined symbol" errors. I have figured out a work around for this - in the add_executable command, I am including the static libraries twice.

My hope is that there is a more standard/better way to deal with this issue. Being that I am not the only developer, and that the majority of regular development is done in windows, I really want a link-order agnostic CMake script. The windows developers just don't deal with this link order issue. On top of that, figuring out the correct order would be very difficult - I do not have that information readily available and there are a lot of static libraries (70 or so).

After searching the internet, I did learn about the -static and -dynamic flags, but getting CMake to include them is non-obvious and gcc complains about not being able to find the dynamic libraries.

Anyway, I welcome suggestions on how to do the right thing.

Answer 1

Did you try disabling the strip? Maybe with something like cmake -DCMAKE_STRIP=/bin/true ..? Maybe that will stop the symbols being thrown out.