Notes for Monday, October 15, 2018

Conan NO_OUTPUT_DIRS and KEEP_RPATHS

Going back to a post a few days ago about problems I was having with using Conan in my CMake project, it turns out that by default Conan will adjust the output directories how it sees fit. If you look at the conan_output_dirs_setup() macro in conanbuildinfo.cmake, the CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY along with other directories are adjusted. This is easily skipped by adding NO_OUTPUT_DIRS to the conan_basic_setup() call.

Likewise, Conan also adjusts some of the rpaths in the resulting executable. This was a surprise when I finally got my binary to build but then wouldn’t run. Again, a simple argument to conan_basic_setup() fixed this, in this case KEEP_RPATHS.

Hence, the call in my project’s CMakeLists.txt file ended up looking like such: conan_basic_setup(NO_OUTPUT_DIRS KEEP_RPATHS).