[Cppunit-devel] Auto registration vs. the linker

[King D. <Ki...@tc...>]

I like and am trying to use auto registration in Visual C++ but the linker
keeps defeating me. The example cppunit tests work fine because you are
building everything as one project. But that is not how I want to do it.
This is for a large system and it would work much nicer to have the tests
for individual subsystems be built as their own projects and simply link
them together with a small runner program within the overall workspace. So I
have a project within the workspace that has the main executable and it just
gets its test from the registry. I don't want any file within that project
to know about what tests are out there. Each subsystem is built as a shared
library that gets linked with the main executable. To add a subsystem to the
lists of tests you just add its project to the dependencies of the main
executable project to get them to link in.

The problem is that it will not work as I described it. The linker is too
smart. It will not even include any of the object files for the unit tests
unless they are somehow referenced from the main executable. That is of
course what the linker is supposed to do. But I don't want to hardcode
references to the tests. This requires extra work to add tests, defeats the
purpose behind auto registration, and makes it more difficult to change the
tests you want to run.

If you don't use a shared library and build in one project you don't have
this problem. The linker includes all .obj files into the output even if
they are not referenced, but will not do that if the same .obj files are
packaged as a shared library. I don't want to build everything in one
project. Different subsytems need different build options and things, so I
want them to be compiled separately with separate configuration.

Does anybody have any way to get the linker to do what I want it to do which
is to say include all translation units from a shared library whether I
reference them or not?

-- 
  Dale King