Re: GNU make integration through an IDE

[Paul D. Smith]

%% "Alain Magloire" <address@hidden> writes:

  am> For example to do a real Progress monitor, meaning how to provide
  am> feedback to the users on how many commands done so far and how
  am> many left ?

First, make can't tell you how many commands are left because it doesn't
know.  This came up a few weeks ago.  The way make works is it starts at
the first node in the dependency graph and works along until it's done.
Make never knows how many operations are left to do, so it never knows
when it will be finished until it already is.

Second, how would you envision the communication between make and the
IDE during the build in the first place?  I can't think of any generic
way to do it other than having the IDE watch the output.  Any sort of
out-of-band communication seems very non-portable and specific to me.

  am> How to extract information from make, i.e. make has all sort of
  am> information but the extracting is nearly impossible.

Well, what are you looking for?

  am> Finally, I hand up rewritting a Makefile Parser but ... why
  am> redoing make again and again.  Lots of other tools been a spinnof
  am> Ant, jam etc ... because of this lacks of flexibility.

I definitely want to have a flag that displays an "elaborated" makefile;
say with all immediate variables expanded, etc.  This is especially
important now that we have $(eval ...) because that can be hard to debug
without this.

Also in the plans is integrating a true scripting language (Guile),
which might make it easier for you to get what you need.

-- 
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 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
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 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist