CMake: how to produce binaries “as static as possible”

Question

I would like to have control over the type of the libraries that get found/linked with my binaries in CMake. The final goal is, to generate binaries \"as static as possi

Answer 1

A well made FindXXX.cmake file will include something for this. If you look in FindBoost.cmake, you can set the Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS variable to control whether or not it finds static or shared libraries. Unfortunately, a majority of packages do not implement this.

If a module uses the find_library command (most do), then you can change CMake's behavior through CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES variable. Here's the relevant CMake code from FindBoost.cmake to use this:

IF(WIN32)
    SET(CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES .lib .a ${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES})
ELSE(WIN32)
    SET(CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES .a ${CMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES})
ENDIF(WIN32)

You can either put this before calling find_package, or, better, you can modify the .cmake files themselves and contribute back to the community.

For the .cmake files I use in my project, I keep all of them in their own folder within source control. I did this because I found that having the correct .cmake file for some libraries was inconsistent and keeping my own copy allowed me to make modifications and ensure that everyone who checked out the code would have the same build system files.