Issues with specific packages

[cfabrito]

Hello! I've been using cpm to manage packages for my project and I adore the concept! Unfortunately I use some libraries with somewhat quirky CMake behaviors that CPM doesn't seem to like.
gl3w - Has an OUTPUT custom command to execute a python script which builds a *.c file. This seems to only happen when building so add_executable complains that the file doesn't exist at configuration time.
globjects & glbinding - This pair of libraries define targets with the same name, leading to a fatal CMake error. ☹️
Are there any possible workarounds?

Thanks

[TheLartians]

Hey @cfabrito, thanks for using CPM.cmake!

Unfortunately, if a library's CMakeLists isn't designed for being used as a subdirectory by other CMake projects, there is a chance that there will be conflicts. In those cases I don't think there is much we can do except for fixing or re-writing the dependency's CMakeLists to support inclusion as a subdirectory. For now, you could create issues in the according repos explaining the error to make the library authors aware of the use-case.

[cfabrito]

Ok, thanks, sounds like a plan! 😄
I don't really know what I'm talking about, but maybe there could be some sort of patching support in CPM that had some way of modifying targets in dependencies? I can't imagine that'd be easy to implement though...
All the best!

[cfabrito]

Done!

[TheLartians]

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but maybe there could be some sort of patching support in CPM that had some way of modifying targets in dependencies?

Yeah I agree that something like that would be great, however it's highly nontrivial as there are an infinite number of ways to structure a CMake project. Imo best we can currently do is to preach good project conventions that work well either installed or as a subdirectory.