[ale] [OT] Any Eclipse and C users on the list

[Michael Potter]

After a couple of hours googling around to see how others are using
CMake and automatic dependency checking, I am beginning to think that
CMake is not the solution to my problem.

I don't want to maintain the dependencies by hand, and I don't want to
continue to use my kludgy bash script for extracting the dependencies.

Here is what I am currently investigating:
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Dependency-Tracking.html#Dependency-Tracking

Automake does dependency tracking as it is compiling so I have hope
that my generated code will not be a problem.   That is in contrast
with dependency tracking that happens at the start of a compile;
because the generated code does not exist at the start of a compile,
the dependencies cannot be determined.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Ryan Curtin <ryan at igglybob.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 10:26:21AM -0500, Michael Potter wrote:
>> Here is my question that I cannot find documented in CMake...
>>
>> Is there a way to generate the dependencies from the source?
>>
>> Specifically, if I have source that looks like this:
>>
>> in dilbert.c:
>> #include "src/alice.h"
>> #include "src/wally.h"
>>
>> Right now I have a hand coded bash script that generates
>> obj/dilbert.o: src/dilbert.c src/alice.h src/wally.h
>>    cc -o $@ src/dilbert.c
>>
>> That way all I need to do is maintain the source and the tedious part
>> of maintaining the makefile is done for me.   The bash script is
>> sophisticated enough to handle recursion and ignoring some includes.
>> As slick as it is, I want to get of this system and move to main
>> stream scheme.
>>
>> How does cmake eliminate that part of the makefile creation?
>
> In general CMake does not do this.  You can set it up in different ways,
> but the way I generally set up a project is to put either a
> CMakeFiles.txt in each directory, or one CMakeFiles.txt somewhere, and a
> command like
>
> add_executable(the_program
>   src/alice.h
>   src/alice.c
>   src/wally.h
>   src/wally.c
>   src/dilbert.c
>   ...
> )
>
> but this does mean that every file you make in the project, you have to
> add it to the list of compiled files.
>
> I think that what you want to do is say something like
> "add_executable(the_program main.c)" and then CMake looks through all
> the #includes of main.c (recursively) to generate a list of files to be
> compiled.
>
> That is a complex problem and while it can be solved with CMake it would
> be... somewhat backhanded.  You could write a script which would look
> through each file in a list for #include lines using regexes, and then
> somehow pruned that list to only those #includes which were relevant
> (i.e. filter out #include <stdio.h> and similar).  Then you could call
> that script again recursively with the new list.
>
> There are a few gotchas in that idea, but it sounds like you already
> have this system basically implemented in bash.  Converting it to a
> CMake script is within the realm of possibility, if that's what you want
> to do.  I've not seen a CMake project that does this, but if it works
> and it's well-documented and maintainable, I don't see any problems with
> it.
>
> --
> Ryan Curtin       | "Think!  What to do!"
> ryan at igglybob.com |   - The Master
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo



-- 
Michael Potter
  Tapp Solutions, LLC
  Replatform Technologies, LLC
+1 770 815 6142  ** Atlanta ** michael at potter.name  **
www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpotter