Add slow external project to cmake - cmake

I am using an external dependency that is shipped as a tar archive inside the source tree. I am building the autotools project by using
ExternalProject_Add
This project will almost never change but takes multiple minutes to compile (way longer than the rest of the source code). After each
make clean
The install directory of the external project is still there but it gets extracted and rebuilt during the next compilation. Is there a way to keep this external project while cleaning / only build it once if the archive does not change?

Related

Make external files dependent on a project in CMake

I have some external files in my project that are frequently changed. However, they are not considered to be source files by CMake, so if I change one of the external files, the project is not rebuilt. I do have this however
set(EXTERNAL file1 file2)
add_executable(${SOURCES} ${HEADERS} ${EXTERNAL})
If I change the actual sources or headers, Visual Studio recognizes the change and rebuilds the project. It doesn't do this for the external files though. How would I force CMake to check for changes in the external files and rebuild them? I was thinking about adding the external files as a custom target and adding that as a dependency to the actual project, but I don't know how well that would work.

How can I configure CMake generated Eclipse project's Build Command and Project Paths?

Our project uses CMake to configure our code. We use Ninja along with a distributed build system. A number of people on our team use Eclipse CDT. We run CMake with the "Eclipse CDT4 - Ninja" generator and the result is generally pretty good.
The issues is that any time a CMake file is changed and you ask Eclipse to build the code it regenerate the eclipse project file overwriting any manual changes you've made to the project.
For example the default build command that it provides the eclipse project is /usr/bin/ninja when in fact I want to take advantage of our distributed build system and set the build command to /usr/bin/ninja -j16. It would be nice if I could have the project file that CMake generates automatically include this setting change.
The other setting I am most interested in preserving is the C/C++ Project Paths->Source. As a general rule we place our CMake build directory as a sibling to the main project directory i.e. ./project ./build. We want to include some files in the build directory in the Eclipse index to make code completion and other tools work better. The default project doesn't include the build directory in source path and thus it does not get indexed.
Is there some way to remedy these issues?
I found a solution to build command issue.
When you run cmake to generate the eclipse project include the additional argument:-DCMAKE_ECLIPSE_NINJA_ARGUMENTS=-j100. I haven't confirmed but I believe a similar command is required for eclipse make projects -DCMAKE_ECLIPSE_MAKE_ARGUMENTS=-j100.
Unfortunately this feature is poorly documented and I have not found a solution to my other issue.

Xcode4, I've created a new scheme for adhoc, unlinked a library, but the build seems the same size?

I'm trying to automatically exclude a library from my release build, but have it present in my adhoc build.
I've found the file build file under ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
I've deleted them, between builds, to make sure they were getting created as the modified date was the same. However, the build is the same size...
Remove from the libaray target.
Make AdHoc build configuration by copying the Release build configuration.
Add -lTestFlight in the other linker flags section of AdHoc build configuration.
Taken from http://d.hatena.ne.jp/basuke+en/20111122/1321924385
Any ideas ?
You can easily manage this by looking at your Build Target in XCode.
Select the one which you do not want to contain the library then click Build Phases and under the sections
Link Binary With Libraries
Copy Bundle Resources
You should be able to remove the unwanted library for that particular build.

Populating the configuration to the nested library project

I have a main project, which includes a nested library project which produces a libCore.a library.
Both of the projects have the two configurations debug and release. Now if I build the main project with a given configuration, how can I make sure that this is passed down to the library project as well?
Make your project directly dependent on the libCore project. Do achieve this, do the following:
Drag the libCore project file to your main project. It happens sometimes, that only the xcodeproj file is moved. If this happens to you, restart XCode (this happend to me with RestKit and the latest XCode).
After point 1 is done and you can browse the dependency project, go to your target build phases and add the libCore as the target dependencies.
Link against libCore.a by adding in the Link Binary with Libraries phase.
These are 3 basic steps, I don't know what the libCore is, if it needs to be linked with any other libraries then you will also have to link your target against those libraries.

MSBuild overwriting dependencies

Ok, so I've got a somewhat complicated problem with my build environment that I'm trying to deal with.
I have a solution file that contains multiple C# projects which is built by a NAnt script calling MSBuild - passing MSBuild the name of the solution file and a path to copy the binaries to. This is because I want my automated build environment (CruiseControl.Net) to create a folder named after the revision of each build - this way I can easily go back to previous binaries for any reason.
So idealy I have a folder layout like this
c:\build\nightly\rev1
c:\build\nightly\rev2
c:\build\nightly\rev3
...
c:\build\nightly\rev10
etc.
The problem that's arisen is I recently added the latest version of the Unity IoC container to my project, checking it directly out of MS's online SVN repository. What's happening is I have a Silverlight 3 project that references the Silverlight version of Unity but I also have other projects (namely my Unit testing project) that reference the standard (non-Silverlight) version of Unity.
So what happens is since MSBuild is dumping everything into one single folder the Silverlight version of the Unity assembly is overwriting the non-Silverlight version because they have the exact same assembly file name.
Then when CruistControl runs my unit tests they fail because they don't have the proper dependencies available anymore (they try to load the Silverlight specific Unity assembly which obviously doesn't work).
So what I want to do is:
keep my desired output directory
structure (folder\revision)
I don't want to have to manually edit
every single proj file I have as this
is error prone when adding new
projects to the solution
Idealy I would like MSBuild to put everything into a folder structure similar to this:
nightly\revision1\project1
nightly\revision1\project2
nightly\revision1\project3
...
nightly\revision2\project1
nightly\revision2\project2
nightly\revision2\project3
etc
I can't modify the Unity project to give it a different file name because it comes from another SVN repository I cannot commit changes to. I found a similar question posted here and the suggested solution was to use a "master" MSBuild file that used a custom task to extract all the project file names out of the solution then loop over each one building them. I tried that but it doesn't build them in the order of their dependencies, so it fails for my project.
Help?
Firstly I would always have the build server delete the old working copy and check out a fresh copy to avoid any problems with stale artifacts from the previous build.
Next I would have nant or msbuild build the solutions as before with the artifacts from each build going to their local working output folders.
After that I'd move the artifacts from their working paths to their output paths, this shouldn't require digging through the project files since you can just tell msbuild/nant to copy working\project1\bin\release\**\*.* to artifacts\project1\.
The script that does this should ideally be stored along with the source with the main file, e.g. build.nant or build.proj in top level of the trunk.
For third party libraries I would simple include the DLLs directory in your repository. Nothing worse than writing some code and having a third party dependency break your build because of changes on their end.
Simply document the versions of the libraries you are using, and if you must update them, you'll have a better sense of what breaks the build before you even check it in.
Also, doesn't CC.Net automatically handle the providing of releases based on revision? I'm using TeamCity and it keeps a copy of the artifacts of every build.
I highly recommend reading JP Boodhoo's Automating Builds with NAnt blog series. That's been my starting point and have made lots of changes for my own taste. I also highly recommend checking out the builds of many open sources projects for examples. I've learned a lot from the builds of the Castle/Nhibernate/Rhino-Tools stack.