How to not install header-sets of private dependencies?

[craig.scott]

@pboettch

I was facing another problem later on: indirect linking with dependent dynamic libraries when RUNPATH is used (and not RPATH). One needs to add manually -Wl,--disable-new-dtags to make modern linkers use RPATH and thus the loader will not clear the paths when loading indirect dependencies.

I just posted this reply in another thread. RPATH should not be preferred over RUNPATH. The latter is actually more correct, but it exposes insufficiently specified dependencies, which I think you’re trying to do deliberately to work around the “I don’t want to install the headers” problem. If you’re using a superbuild, that really complicates things from an install perspective. Frankly, it’s pretty fragile to try to install things that have been provided to your main build using ExternalProject. It also doesn’t play nice with package managers, if people building your project may want to do that (I don’t know if that’s relevant to your scenario).