When CMP0003 was first introduced we wanted to link all libraries by
full path. However, some projects had problems on platforms where
find_library would find /usr/lib/libfoo.so when the project really
wanted to link to /usr/lib/<arch>/libfoo.so and had been working by
accident because pre-CMP0003 behavior used -lfoo to link.
We first tried to address that in commit v2.6.0~440 (Teach find_library
to avoid returning library paths in system directories, 2008-01-23) by
returning just "foo" for libraries in implicit link directories. This
caused problems for projects expecting find_library to always return a
full path. We ended up using the solution in commit v2.6.0~366 (...
switch library paths found in implicit link directories to use -l,
2008-01-31). However, the special case for libraries in implicit link
directories has also proven problematic and confusing.
Introduce policy CMP0060 to switch to linking all libraries by full path
even if they are in implicit link directories. Explain in the policy
documentation the factors that led to the original approach and now to
this approach.
Organize the documentation into subsections to separate the signatures.
Refactor the discussion of allowed link items into bullet points and
expand into more detail on each.
These notes apply only for the use case of creating a package for
redistribution on machines other than that where it is built. Clarify
this to readers by placing the discussion in dedicated sections titled
accordingly.
Make the documentation change made by commit ef10b87c (CMP0022: Plain
target_link_libraries must populate link interface, 2013-11-02) in the
new location for the same documentation.
Generator expressions are supported in many places and are a distinct
concept worthy of their own manual page. The old builtin documentation
was previously represented by preprocessor macros to generate it into
each place that supports them. Factor out the duplicate content into a
dedicated cmake-generator-expressions manual page and reference it from
each original location.
Brad King
Stephen Kelly
Kitware Robot