[Qt-creator] proposals for generic project manager

[Sven Goericke]

Hi all,

On 08/15/2013 01:25 AM, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
> 
> Exactly! We use a make(1) target to generate the .includes and .files  (and 
> even the .creator and .config)
> 
Well, that's one of the opportunities of make: it let's you do a lot of
things. While our build-system at work updates the <project>.file nicely
it can't update the <project>.config file. And it will never do because
it's somewhat complex and can't just simply add the CPPFLAGS into the
.config file. It would be more easy to change Creator in a way you can
define CPPFLAGS for any arbitary configuration than changing our
build-system. At least i think so (and i'll try).

The reason we'll never change the build-system is that we don't have any
policy about IDE's in our company. What we have are (like almost every
company) coding-styles and guidelines as well some other policies. But
nobody cares with what editor or IDE or whatever we write our code. And
at least the "major" IDE's used by collegues (almost eclipse, some
netbeans, some Creator) is able to work with Makefiles.

Also for my personal i use Makefiles. Because they do what i want that
they do. Maintainig qmake- or CMakeFiles wouldn't give me any benefit.
After spending some time to the Makefiles(.in[.*]) i use it's now
absolute simple to add now components.

Example:

# module.mk for libaggxp

component_type			:=	static_lib
component_name			:=	aggxp
component_sources		:=	$(shell find $(subdirectory) -name '*.cpp')
component_include_dir		:=	$(subdirectory)/include
component_lib_depends		:=	agg
component_cxxflags		:=	-I"common/include" -I"agg/include"
-I"/usr/include/freetype2"
component_ldflags		:=

#==============================================================================
# Nothing to edit beyond this line!
#==============================================================================

include build/bottom.mk

And as have to support three Platforms (Win,MacOS,Linux) they work on
every of them as long they have make and some compiler (g++,clang,msvc)
available ;-)

I was an Emacs user for at least the last 5 years. The only reason i
switched to Creator is that it's incredible fast compared to other IDE
and can almost be used without using the mouse. I tried almost every IDE
outthere but could never stick with one for longer than a week.

Anyway, i like to add some things to Creator which i miss. Of course
coordinated with the maintainers (that's the reason i'll not touch the
way the generic project manager keeps the list of files belonging to the
project.

> I wondered if the output of `make -p` could be parsed gainfully. But I didn't 
> actually work on this (as our "make target" solution satisfied us sufficiently 
> and it can even be inserted in qtcreator's build process).
> 
I did a look at the output of "make -p -n" at work yesterday. It's just
horrible and i can't imagine that somebody could write a parser for that.

Cheers,
Sven