CMake Error: CMake can not determine linker language for target: myapp

Question

I am trying to compile vMime by cmake, but I am getting error above, I am using graphical interface of cmake and my makefiles.txt is below. It configures properly but do not generate

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)
PROJECT(CXX)#vmime
enable_language(CXX)
set(VerifyCXX VerifyCXX.cxx)
add_definitions(-DVERIFY_CXX)
set_target_properties(${TARGET} PROPERTIES LINKER_LANGUAGE Cxx)
add_executable(myapp vmime)
install(TARGETS myapp DESTINATION bin)

Help will be highly appreciated as I am stuck at point for couple of days.

Solution 1

CMake probably can not determine linker language for target myapp, because the target does not contain any source files with recognized extensions.

add_executable(myapp vmime)

should be probably replaced by

add_executable(myapp ${VerifyCXX})

Also this command

set_target_properties(${TARGET} PROPERTIES LINKER_LANGUAGE Cxx) 

cannot be succesfull, because ${TARGET} is used-before-set. You should call it after add_executable

set_target_properties(myapp PROPERTIES LINKER_LANGUAGE CXX)

Note that usually it is not needed at all.

Solution 2

For others' benefit, make sure you did not overlook an earlier error such as:

Cannot find source file:
    MyFirstSourceFile.cpp

Another way to cause CMake to give you the error, "CMake Error: CMake can not determine linker language for target: myapp", is if you mistakenly point it exclusively at sources that do not exist.

For instance: I'm moving files from one directory to another and had the pre-move files with the post-move paths in my CMakeLists.txt. My output window is not very tall and I focused too soon on the "can not determine linker language" error!

Comments

[Ahsan Roy]

Thankx, that was really useful .