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by pornel 1809 days ago
Oh, there are tons of CMake replacements. There's a ?make for every letter of the alphabet. The problem is that C users can't agree on which one is the best. Whichever build system you pick, it will have detractors who think it's the worst and refuse to use it. I think CMake survives, because it got early traction from not ignoring Visual Studio like every one else, and survives by being the least objectionable (which doesn't mean it's good).

But if you think cmake can easily consume libraries that work on multiple platforms, please help me use libpng in MozJPEG's cmake, because it's a fucking stupid nightmare:

   -- Could NOT find ZLIB (missing: ZLIB_LIBRARY) (found version "1.2.8")
1 comments
jcelerier 1809 days ago
> -- Could NOT find ZLIB (missing: ZLIB_LIBRARY) (found version "1.2.8")

that liklely means that the headers were found but not the .so. For instance maybe you have a stale zlib.h in /usr/local, but not zlib-dev installed (thus no libz.so).

You can use cmake's --debug-find first to have more info, and if that's not enough, --trace / --trace-expand ; for instance the person who wrote the FindZLIB.cmake used in that case could have done something like:

    find_library(ZLIB_LIBRARY z)
    if(ZLIB_LIBRARY) 
      if(NOT /* logic to detect if the library has a specific symbol, for instance gzopen */) 
        unset(ZLIB_LIBRARY)
      endif()
    endif()
which would result in the above error message. The main problem being that the person who wrote that script did not add a small log output to indicate why a given .so was not considered valid.
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