How to make package built with make install available for cmake?

Question

So, I'm trying to build an application that requires gtkglextmm on CentOS. So far, I grabbed the source (from here) for gtkglext and gtkglextmm, and (finally) figured out how to compile them and install them using ./configure then make then sudo make install. That was pretty cool to get that to work.

Now, I'm trying to build Degate with cmake and it's complaining that it can't find gtkglextmm. What do I need to do to get the gtkglextmm library I built, available for cmake?

Rephrase: Built and installed library a with make,make install. Now want to build application b that depends on a with cmake. How?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is a newcomer's notes made for my team as we adopt cmake. It summarizes briefly what I thought would be somewhere in a novice's example. Although with references and suitable for novices, I am very new to the material and this example may suffer accordingly.

General info for this question is at: https://cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:How_To_Find_Libraries - in particular, find_package can be used on any of the named packages listed by the help command:
cmake --help-module-list Note: the 'Find' is omitted (e.g., FindLibXml2 -> find_package(LibXml2) )

However, for this type of library, it is more likely that it will not be in that list, in which case you want to use find_library and find_path instead. A simple example is:

find_library(SQLITE3_LIB sqlite3) # simple because I did not need to give paths
find_path(SQLITE3_PATH sqlite3.h)
target_link_libraries( your_target_name ${SQLITE3_LIB} )
include_directories( ${SQLITE3_PATH} )

You do not need to test if these have the '-NOTFOUND' return value because cmake will exit with an error if they do:

...
CMake Error: The following variables are used in this project, but they are set to NOTFOUND.
Please set them or make sure they are set and tested correctly in the CMake files:
SQLITE3_LIB
     linked by target "test" in directory /home/matlab/QFDC_ROOT/api

-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

Note that the all-capitalized 'SQLITE3_LIB' and 'SQLITE3_PATH' are the variable names that I chose. You choose the variable names. If you have other libraries and include directories, you can list them before and after this one and separated by spaces (I ordered them by their link order consistently for both, although I think include paths are insensitive).

Your case may not be so simple, in which case you want to use the CMake features described at find_library for providing CMake more information about where it should find that library. There are other Q&A on specifically that topic - my favorite is to produce your own FindXXX.cmake (although it is a very terse answer pointing you to an example).

In many cases, it is helpful to run make VERBOSE=1 to help you troubleshoot the process, such as cd build && cmake .. && make VERBOSE=1.

For even better diagnostics, I used DLRdave's answer to print out the INCLUDE_DIRS and I used a simple message to return the results of my variables:

message( STATUS "SQLITE3_LIB: ${SQLITE3_LIB} SQLITE3_PATH: ${SQLITE3_PATH}")
get_property(dirs DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} PROPERTY INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES)
foreach(dir ${dirs})
  message(STATUS "dir='${dir}'")
endforeach()

EDIT NOTE: this answer was effectively re-written 2016-04-08 after discovering that the previous day's implementation erred and confused find_library() and find_path().