How to improve the DLL management

Usage
1

Hi there,

I am currently developing some unit and integration tests that are dependent on Qt6. Right now I am using the following custom command to copy and paste the DLLs needed to execute the test on the CI machine.

    get_target_property(_qmake_executable Qt6::qmake IMPORTED_LOCATION)
    get_filename_component(_qt_bin_dir "${_qmake_executable}" DIRECTORY)
    find_program(WINDEPLOYQT_EXECUTABLE windeployqt HINTS "${_qt_bin_dir}")
    find_program(MACDEPLOYQT_EXECUTABLE macdeployqt HINTS "${_qt_bin_dir}")

    add_custom_command(TARGET UnitTest POST_BUILD
            COMMAND "${CMAKE_COMMAND}" -E
            env PATH="${_qt_bin_dir}" "${WINDEPLOYQT_EXECUTABLE}"
            --no-translations
            "$<TARGET_FILE:UnitTest>"
            COMMENT "Running windeployqt...")

This is done for each test that it’s depending on external DLLs. The code above is even copying MVSC DLLs…

I am wondering how I can improve the way of handling the DLLs, is there any way to just load the DLL at execution time and link it to execute the test?

If I continue doing it in this way I will have a hundred DLLs around the place which are going to fill my hard disk at some point.

Thank you so much in advance,
xhustago

2

You could add the Qt path to PATH. There is also the $<TARGET_RUNTIME_DLLS> genex, but this will not handle Qt plugins at all (which, I believe, is the benefit of windeployqt).

3

Yes, locally I have Qt/bin in the path. Same for OpenCV for example. For the CI is not enough.
I’ll check the $<TARGET_RUNTIME_DLLS>.