Jeff Garland wrote:
Michael Marcin wrote:
Speaking of tools...
I like Boost.Build a lot but a major stumbling block for integrating it into our company is that our programmers are mostly familiar with IDE environments like CodeWarrior, Visual Studio, XCode, etc. A program that could transform a bbv2 project into IDE projects would make the barrier to adoption much smaller. Especially if that tool was extensible so new modules could be added to support different IDEs.
You could use MPC (make project creator). It's a set of perl scripts that generate native makefiles for various platforms -- various solution files for VC*, nmake, borland make, Makefiles for *nix, etc. This is the system used to maintain makefiles for ACE/TAO which is ported to tons of platforms. You can download the tool from:
info --> http://www.ociweb.com/products/mpc download --> http://www.ociweb.com/products/mpc/down.html
MPC is nice and could be part of a solution if the requirements only where to produce IDE project and solution files from Jamfiles. Boost.Build and/or bjam could be extended to produce a <sub-project>.mpc file for each Jamfile and a <tool>.mpt file per tool(-set) used and then invoke mpc to generate the buildfiles. This should be recursive for a full project source tree. By the way, http://www.trolltech.com has a similar solution called qmake which is used in Qt. This may or may not be more appropriate in an optional add-on to Boost.Build. This highlights another nice feature of such tools, which I have met. If you have an opensource project in which you do not expect users to be familiar with your build system. You can provide pre-built IDE projects for libraries, executables and/or example and tutorial code.
Someone of the folks at OCI previously put together a set of boost project files. Those are in the vault at:
These seems to be hand crafted. Is that correct? In that case I do not think this is the way to go.
Note, I haven't tried the Boost files, but I've used MPC on cross-platform projects -- it's a nifty solution.
Agree, Many developers prefer their native IDE project- , build-, and debug-management . The challenges do however soon become clear. Sooner or later changes to the native build files must go back to the .mpc or jam files. That becomes annoying, error prone, or outright neglected.
As for SoC maybe we could tranlate bbv2 into MPC and use MPC to generate native files -- essentially using it as the 'compiler backend'. Not sure if there would be too much overlap there with bbv2, but it would be worth looking at as an approach.
The MPC .mpt template files for the tools should be generated as well. This would be based on bbv2 so most redundant overlap should be avoidable. Even if the mpc and qmake have their shiny aspects, I would be much more interested in good plug-in support for bbv2/bjam in IDEs such as Eclipse/CDE, VisualStudio, etc. In the IDE this should have the look and feel of the native build system if possible. This involves: - adding and removing source files from projects in the IDE - creating new projects - starting bbv2 builds which reports errors into the IDE interface - execute or debug sessions should invoke build with bbv2 and offer to rebuild first if required - saving files could start background builds like in Eclipse managed C++ projects The funny thing is that I don't care that much myself for these features, I am more than happy with emacs + Boost.Build or whatever other _real_ build system is I use. What frustrates me is that so many developers use build systems that come with their IDE without any regard to the possible downsides they bring with them. Also, I believe real IDE plug-in support could be a boost in the popularity of bjam and Boost.Build. -- Bjørn Roald