Re: GNU make integration through an IDE

[Noel Yap]

"Paul D. Smith" wrote:
> Yes, not only in theory but in fact.
> 
> But what I'm saying is that if you're providing a capability to jump to
> where a target is defined, you'll have to pick one of those.  How do you
> choose which one?  Or do you list the install target 3 times?

Not that I agree with creating an IDE, but how do IDE's typically do it for 
overloaded function names and re-used static linkage or anonymous namespace 
symbols?

> Hm.  OK, well, maybe I don't understand what you're looking for then.
> Note that of the 5 directories the first one might have 3 files that
> could be built, the second one 3,000, the third 50, etc. so any progress
> meter that simply relied on those 5 directories without knowing what's
> in them wouldn't be very accurate.

IMHO, this is another reason not to use recursive make.

> Ah!  So, it's very like VC++ project files or something.
> 
> Well, that's one way to do it, and if you do this then certainly most of
> the advanced features we've been discussing are things you won't have to
> worry about: since you're writing the makefile it's doubtful you'd
> include those things (they are hard to automate).

OTOH, developers who know make and want to take advantage of advanced features 
will be extremely limited and frustrated.  I know I would be.

For example, as I've said before, we have a standard infrastructure.  But being 
an infrastructure, I'm free to use the parts I want, override the parts that 
don't fit, and add stuff I want.  In my specific case, I was able to encode our 
package version
dependencies and have them checked at build time (ie during make makefile 
parsing) such that conflicting versions will cause a build error.

> As a _user_ I know what I would want though: I would want two modes.
> One that wrote makefiles for me using whatever method you come up with:
> directly, through automake, whatever.  As long as it was drop-dead
> simple to use and accurate; in this mode I'd probably never care to even
> see the makefile.

I just use "cp" on an existing makefile :-)

> The other mode would be a "passthrough" mode which let me write my own
> set of makefiles; here I'd want as much of the "helper" infrastructure
> as practical including the editor help, the markup of make output to
> find errors, etc. etc. BUT! in no way should that mode constrain what I
> put into my makefile.  In that mode every decision of the IDE should be
> "lenient"; it should not force me to do anything.  If the IDE doesn't
> recognize what I'm doing it should shrug and just do its best to
> interpret it, but let me do it.

I completely agree.

MTC,
Noel
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