[Qt-creator] Remote Linux plugin and CMake

[Christian Kandeler]

On 08/21/2013 11:49 AM, Teske Daniel wrote:
> I know there are some people which would like to use cmake as their build system and make use of the remote linux support in creator. We need your input. The remote linux plugin is actually generic enough to make that possible. The remote linux plugin just needs information on what to deploy.
>
> There are at least 3 different ways we could implement that.
> - We could integrate with cpack. That is let cpack generate a package for us, which we then deploy and install.
> This is convenient for those that already are using cpack. And it's not much work to add the necessary lines to the CMakeLists.txt file.
>
> - We could "make install" the project into a temporary directory and then deploy that directory.
> This is easy to implement and probably works with most projects.

The current implementation of generic deployment support in the 
RemoteLinux plugin expects a list of files and destinations 
(ProjectExplorer::DeploymentData) and simply copies them over to the 
target device via SFTP. It makes no assumptions at all about the source 
of the deployment information (typically some build system).
The two approaches above seem to require additional, build system 
dependent work: They both need a preparatory step (creating the package 
and installing to a temporary directory, respectively), and the cpack 
approach seems to require an installation step after the files have been 
copied. I have trouble seeing how this (especially the latter) could be 
set up automatically without the two plugins, which currently are 
completely decoupled, working tightly together. Am I overlooking something?

> - The project has to generate a file which tells Creator what to deploy. Oleksii Serdiuk has implemented that, and it works like this. The project has to have a CMakeDeployment.txt in the root of the project, which essentially contains a list of files that should be deployed and where to deploy them
> The benefit here is, that Oleksii already wrote a patch, and that we could use the same file format also for the generic and autotools projects.

This approach does not have the above-mentioned problem.


Christian