Re: [cdt-dev] building projects prior to a launch

[James Blackburn <jamesblackburn@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 May 2010 15:18, Doug Schaefer <cdtdoug@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> +1 on all this from me. With my architect hat on, the real correct
> architectural thing to do is to get the platform build system to work
> correctly for us without having to put ugly hacks over top of it like we've
> done for years. It would be great of we could put together a proposal on
> what we would do in the ideal case, taking configurations and dependencies
> into account and bring that to the platform team. We know the challenges in
> getting them to change, but this is still an ugly thumb which really hurts
> our users (or at least confuses them), and we need to start somewhere.

I completely agree. Configurations are integral to the way C/C++
developers work -- especially in the embedded world, where
configurations are key to how build software targetted at different
customers & platforms.

We had a short discussion on this on the Platform core.resources call
yesterday. Without some form of platform support for multiple
configurations in a project, it's near on impossible for us to
usefully take advantage of core.resources build :(.
There are a couple of ideas we had which might allow us to improve the
platform without too much headache.  One idea I came up with, is
faking up a builder per configuration. We could extend builders so
they belong to a particular family of builders (only some of which
need be run in a particular build). The platform can then be in charge
of keeping the delta per builder (as it currently does) and we can
enhance the project dependency graph to be between builders rather
than just projects.   There are no doubt obstacles I haven't thought
off, but how hard could it be...?