Ug. I spoke too soon.
There’s actually several libraries I’m trying to -force_load. As you can see, avfilter for example, depends on avresample, swscale, etc. and this is defined in the set_target_properties. If I link them like I was doing before cmake ensures that things are linked in the correct order. However, when I put them in quotes with the generator expression cmake no longer knows that these refer to the libraries I’d defined earlier so it doesn’t not ensure correct link order and I get undefined symbols at link time. I’ll try the target_link_options path instead and see if that does it.