CMake- Difficulties building static library

Question

So I have been trying to build libarchive for a couple of days now, following this guide and many other threads: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/BuildInstructions

I want a static library with LZMA, zlib and bzip2 support. I got static versions of these too (lib's)

I just cant get it to work properly. Ive used CMAKE to generate the make files for VS2010 and NMAKE. With both of these options the thing compiles just fine, but when i try to use the archive_static.lib generated, in my project I get plenty of unresolved externals. Compiling the .dll version of the library works without unresolved externals, but then it starts asking for zlib.dll, bzip2.dll etc, which i dont have and dont want to use.

I think i need to set some flags with cmake, but im not sure how to do that.

Any help is greatly appreciated. http://www.libarchive.org/

Answer 1

I can't be sure if that's what happening here, but please bear in mind, that when linking binaries into a static library, its external dependencies do not necessarily get embedded into it, that means you might need to provide thet static libraries on which your program indirectly depends through libarchive, namely LZMA, zlib and bzip2 in your case, explicitly.

Furthermore there's some confusion on windows when it comes to linking static vs dynamic, for in both cases you provide a .lib file, so it is very easy to mix things up and provide the dynamicaly linked .lib, instead of the static version. If you do that, the linker may refuse to link your program (that notably happens with boost), or may link just fine and then, at the time of execution, the OS will require the respective .dll's.