Handling binary dependencies across platforms

Question

I've got a C++ project where we have loads and loads of dependencies. The project should work on Linux and Windows, so we've ported it to CMake. Most dependencies are now included right into the source tree and build alongside the project, so there are no problems with those.

However, we have one binary which depends on Fortran code etc. and is really complicated to build. For Linux, it's also not available as a package, but only as precompiled binaries or with full source (needs a BLAS library installed and several other dependencies). For windows, the same library is available as binary, building for Windows seems even more complicated.

The question is, how do you handle such dependencies? Just check in the binaries for the supported platforms, and require the user to set up his build environment otherwise (that is, manually point to the binary location), or would you really try to get them compiled along (even if it requires installing like 10 libraries -- BLAS libraries are the biggest pain here), or is there some other recommended way to handle that?

Answer 1

One question to you. Does the users need to modify this binary, or are they just happy it's there so the can use/access it? If they don't need to modify it, check in the binaries.

Answer 2

I would agree, check in the binaries for each platform if they are not going to be modified very often. Not only will this reduce build times, but it will also reduce frustration from unnecessary compilations.

Answer 3

If the binary is independant of the other part of your build process, you definitively should check-in it. But as you cannot include every version of the binary (I mean for every platform and compile flags the user might use) the build from source seems mandatory.

I have done something similar. I have checked-in the source code archives of the libraries/binaries I needed. Then I wrote makefile/scripts to build them according to the targeted platform/flags in a specific location (no standard OS location) and make my main build process to point to the right location. I have done that to be able to handle the correct versions and options of the libraries/binaries I needed. It's quite a hard work to make things works for different platforms but it's worth the time !

Oh, and of course it's easier if you use crossplatform build tools :)