On 6/7/21 7:48 PM, John Maddock via Boost wrote:
On 07/06/2021 17:26, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
Since it is totally legitimate to use Boost.Test in header only mode, and many libraries currently do this, it is hardly a "waste of time" to support this under CMake. Under CMake you can't use header-only libraries without linking to
Edward Diener wrote: their targets. So there's no real benefit from having a separate header-only target to link to; you can just link to the ordinary target Boost::unit_test_framework.
Doesn't that a) cause the unit test lib to be build when it doesn't need to be, and b) add the resulting binary to library link list when it doesn't need to be?
But I do appreciate the simplicity of a single target ;)
Another question is whether unnecessarily linking would cause duplicate symbols or ODR issues. I believe, you're not supposed to use header-only Boost.Test and then link against it, too, as the same symbols would be defined both in the test and the library. Boost.Test could define two sets of targets - one for header-only and the other for separately built library. One benefit of that is that you could use different macros for these two targets, if needed (e.g. if the library sources need to discriminate between the two configs).