Creating reusable packages

We’ve extensively used find_package() in previous chapters and observed its convenience and simplicity. To make our project accessible through this command, we need to complete a few steps so CMake can treat our project as a coherent package:

1. Make our targets relocatable.
2. Install the target export file to a standard location.
3. Create a config file for the package.
4. Generate a version file for the package.

Let’s start from the beginning: why do targets need to be relocatable and how can we do this?

Understanding the issues with relocatable targets

Installation solves many problems but also introduces some complexity. The CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is platform specific and can be set by the user at the installation stage with the --install-prefix command-line argument. The challenge is that target export files are generated before installation, during the build stage, when the final destination of the installed...