Wt

Environment: Windows, MSVC, CMake 3.31, static build, Wt 4.13 release branch

After building static libraries from Wt the generated file 'wt-target-http.cmake' contains absolute path to Zlib library and OpenSSL library.

E.g.

set_target_properties(Wt::HTTP PROPERTIES
  INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES "Wt::Wt;c:/_Dev/out/zlib/msvc17-amd64-static/lib/zlibstaticd.lib;..."
)

Hence a consumer cannot use a prebuilt package of static Wt with CMake exported targets on another machine.

This bug can be fixed by using imported targets in CMake rather than using CMake variables:

E.g. in src\http\CMakeLists.txt we have:

  TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES(wthttp
    PUBLIC
      wt
    PRIVATE
      ${MY_ZLIB_LIBS}
      ${MY_SSL_LIBS}
...

And should be like this:

  TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES(wthttp
    PUBLIC
      wt
    PRIVATE
      ZLIB::ZLIB
      OpenSSL::SSL OpenSSL::Crypto
...

Then we will have correct INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES in exported CMake targets:

set_target_properties(Wt::HTTP PROPERTIES
  INTERFACE_LINK_LIBRARIES "Wt::Wt;\$<LINK_ONLY:ZLIB::ZLIB>;\$<LINK_ONLY:OpenSSL::SSL>;\$<LINK_ONLY:OpenSSL::Crypto>;...
)

This would allow the consumer of Wt to do find_package(ZLIB REQUIRED) and linking will succeed.

The following dependent libraries are affected:

• ZLIB
• OpenSSL
• Sqlite3
• PostgreSQL

For SQlite3 the internal finder module does not support imported targets. I suggest to remove internal package finders and use CMake default find modules for all dependent libraries or even use exported targets from dependent libraries where applicable.