[pfultz2]

Daniel Pfeffier’s effective cmake talks about how to do that. Setup each project standalone and get the dependencies with find_package. Then create a superprojects thats add each dependency with add_subdirectory and override find_package to be a no-op for dependencies added with add_subdirectory, since the “imported” target is already part of the build:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsXLMQ6WgIk

Now, overriding a builtin function is not the best idea so in boost cmake modules we have a bcm_ignore_package function which will setup find_package to ignore the package :

http://bcm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/src/BCMIgnorePackage.htm...

[therealjumbo]

Just watched that video, long but awesome. I'm not sure on how exactly his strategy is supposed to go, but it sounds like the superproject is another repo. I don't really want that. What I'm thinking right now is to use the same overall idea, but instead of a superproject, I use the same repo, and use: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/module/ExternalProject.h...

But put that behind a flag, that defaults to off, so it doesn't interfere with the distributions. And it supports patching so I can patch whatever dependency's CMake, in the event that they don't (yet?) support the same strategy so it can work transitively without having to boil the ocean. Granted, you would need to write patch files, for basically all your deps initially because nobody else is doing it that way.

For reference, I'm trying to help convert an existing open source project from autotools to cmake, but at work I'm the resident cmake expert, and we have multiple products, which effectively are built as different 'distributions' (not always Linux based) so I've been searching for a good way to do this for a while, even though I just started contributing to OSS.

[slavik81]

I was working on this topic a few years ago and one of the things I noticed was that a lot of software patterns that work on the source code level can also be applied at the library or project level. What you're describing is basically Dependency Injection and the super-project is a Container.

It seemed like such a good idea, but I quit working on large software projects about the time I thought of it, so I never got a chance to actually try it outside of toy projects. I'm glad to hear that somebody else independently discovered and pursued the idea. If anyone has written about how adopting this approach has worked out for them, I'd love to read it.