Adding a "preprocessor include" doesn't seem to have effect - ide

I want the Ecplise CDT parser to pre-include a file not specified in my source file, for reasons I won't go into, so as not to complain about undeclared identifiers in various places.
I tried to do this using Project | Properties | C/C++ General | Preprocesor Includes | Entries and adding the relevant file for all languages. However, this doesn't seem to have an effect. If I go to Paths and Symbols | Includes, I can only add include directories, not include files.
What am I doing wrong and how can I get the C/C++ parser to include my file?
Note: I'm using nVIDIA CUDA 8.0's nsight, a modified CUDA-enabled Eclipse; the platform version is 4.4.0.

As you noticed, Paths and Symbols | Includes only supports include directories, so Preprocessor Include Paths, Macros etc. is the way to go.
Some common pitfalls that you may be running into:
In the Entries tab, are you selecting the correct language under Languages? Each language has its own set of entries.
In the Providers tab, for CDT User Setting Entries (assuming that's the one you're adding the entries to), is Use global provider shared between projects unchecked? If it's checked, project-specific entries will be ignored.
Have you rebuilt the project's index (Project -> C/C++ Index -> Rebuild)? New settings are typically not picked up until a rebuild of the index.
Other things that may help:
If, in the Add Include dialog you are specifying the include file as a Project Path or Workspace Path, try using a Filesystem Path instead, even if the file is inside your project or workspace. This sometimes helps.
In the same dialog, try checking Treat as built-in. I'm not sure what exactly this does for Include Files, but it has helped me in the past for Include Directories.
Finally, if none of this works, there is a more direct way to specify -include or any other flag:
In the Providers tab, select the Built-in Compiler Settings provider.
Be sure Use global provider shared between projects is unchecked
Append -include <path> or whatever other flag to the Command to get compiler specs.

Related

When I should use find_package

I am learning CMake, and I feel hard to understand when I should use find_package.
For separate compilation, we need to let the compiler knows where to find the header file, and this could be done by target_include_directories. For linking, we need to let the linker knows where the implementation is, and this could be done by target_link_libraries. It seems like that is all we need to do to compile a project. Could anyone explain why and when we should use find_package?
If a package you intend allows for the use of find_package, you should use it. If a package comes with a working configuration script, it'll encourage you to use the library the way it's intended to be used likely come with a simple way to add include directories and dependencies required.
When is it possible to use find_package?
There needs to be either a configuration script (<PackageName>Config.cmake or packagename-config.cmake) that gets installed with the package or find script (Find<PackageName>.cmake). The latter one in some cases even comes with the cmake installation instead of the package installed, see CMake find modules.
Should you create missing scripts yourself?
There are several benefits in creating a package configuration script yourself, even if a package doesn't come with a existing configuration or find script:
The scripts separate the information about libraries from the logic used to create your own target. The use of the 2 commands find_package and target_link_libraries is concise and any logic you may need to collect and apply information like dependencies, include directories, minimal versions of the C++ standard to use, ect. would probably take up much more space in your CMakeLists.txt files thus making it harder to understand.
If makes library used easy to replace. Basically all it takes to go with a different version of the same package would be to modify CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, CMAKE_MODULE_PATH or package-specific <PackageName>_ROOT variables. If you ever want to try out different versions of the same library, this is incredibly useful.
The logic is reuseable. If you need to use the same functionality in a different project, it takes little effort to reuse the same logic. Even if a library is only used within a single project, but in multiple places, the use of find_package can help keeping the logic for "importing" a lib close to its use (see also the first bullet point).
There can be multiple versions of the same library with automatic selection of applicable ones. Note that this requires the use of a version file, but this file allows you to specify, if a version of the package is suitable for the current project. This allows for the checking the target architecture, ect. This is helpful when cross compiling or when providing both 32 and 64 bit versions of a library on Windows: If a version file indicates a mismatch the search for a suitable version simply continues with different paths instead of failing fatally when considering the first mismatch.
You will probably find CMake's guide on using dependencies helpful. It describes find_package and alternatives, and when each one is relevant / useful. Here's an excerpt from the section on find_package (italics added):
A package needed by the project may already be built and available at some location on the user's system. That package might have also been built by CMake, or it could have used a different build system entirely. It might even just be a collection of files that didn't need to be built at all. CMake provides the find_package() command for these scenarios. It searches well-known locations, along with additional hints and paths provided by the project or user. It also supports package components and packages being optional. Result variables are provided to allow the project to customize its own behavior according to whether the package or specific components were found.
find_package requires that the package provide CMake support in the form of specific files that describe the package's contents to CMake. Some library authors provide this support (the most desirable scenario for you, the package consumer), some don't but are prominent enough that CMake itself comes with such files for those packages, or in the worst case, there is no CMake support at all, in which case you can either do something to get the either of the previous good outcomes, or perform some kludges to get the job done (ie. define the targets yourself in your project's CMake config).

cmake: package config for installing arbitrary file dependencies for a target

I am creating a cmake package config file (a Foo-config.cmake) for a pre-existing .dll not created by cmake.
The annoying thing is that the .dll depends on some data files.
When a user consumes my package in his own cmake project, I want the INSTALL target to install both the .dll and data files to his specified install location. I don't want him to have to write extra install() rules to do that.
Is it good practice to write the install() rules directly in my Foo-config.cmake? Or is there a better way to do this, maybe with set_target_properties()? I just couldn't find the appropriate property for associating arbitrary file dependencies to a target.
In an alternate universe where this .dll didn't already exist and I had to create it myself using cmake, would I need to create a custom Foo-config.cmake, or is there something in cmake that can automatically generate it for me to achieve the same thing?
FWIW the .dll is an internal legacy library and is normally built by Visual Studio and uploaded in a .zip file to our internal artifactory. I want us to migrate away from manually pulling down .zip files from artifactory and manually integrating the files into Visual Studio projects.
I've since found that there are a couple different ways to do this:
In the config file, simply create one or more variables for the files/dirs you want to install. Then install those using install(FILES) and/or install(DIRECTORY). More info: https://stackoverflow.com/a/46361538/189341
Use file(GET_RUNTIME_DEPENDENCIES). More info:
https://discourse.cmake.org/t/installing-a-pre-built-module-and-its-various-dependencies/5227
How to use cmake file( GET_RUNTIME_DEPENDENCIES in an install statement?
Is it good practice to write the install() rules directly in my Foo-config.cmake?
No.
From 480 *-config.cmake and *Config.cmake files on my system none calls install().
Or is there a better way to do this, maybe with set_target_properties()?
No.
In an alternate universe where this .dll didn't already exist and I had to create it myself using cmake, would I need to create a custom Foo-config.cmake
No. This is unrelated to if you create a .dll or not. If .dll exists, there is no need to create Foo-config.cmake anyway. It is your choice that you want to (or make users to) use find_package.
is there something in cmake that can automatically generate it for me
No.
If you don't intent to support find_package features - VERSION OPTIONAL_COMPONENTS PATHS HINTS CONFIGS etc. - then just go with include(). find_package is just include() with some extra options.
If you want to have install() in your find_package, then just protect it with a variable, like if (FOO_DO_INSTALL) install(....) endif().

Variable interpolation in -D option

As a package manager for a Linux distribution, I want to install docs into a separate prefix. With CMake projects, the docs installation location is controlled by CMAKE_INSTALL_DOCDIR from GNUInstallDirs module. Unfortunately, unlike the other directory variables, this one contains the project name so I cannot just use cmake "-DCMAKE_INSTALL_DOCDIR=$myDocPrefix/doc".
With GNU Make, I would run make "DOCDIR=$myDocPrefix/doc/\$(PROJECT_NAME)" and have Make interpolate it but the documentation of CMake’s -D option does not mention interpolation and I understand that CMake uses much more complex system of cache entries where interpolation might be problematic (especially if the referenced variable is not yet in cache).
I could pass tailor-made CMAKE_INSTALL_DOCDIR to each CMake project but would be bothersome as I would have to do that in every package definition manually; being able to define configureCmakeProject function and have it take care of everything automatically would be better. When setting it manually, I would also want to make sure it matches the PROJECT_NAME of the respective CMake project – well, I could resign on that and just use $packageName from the package definition instead but keeping packages as close to upstream as possible is preferred.
Alternately, I could try to grep CMakeLists.txt for project command but that seems fragile and might still result in misalignments. I doubt it is possible to extract it using some CMake API since the project is not configured at the time and we actually need the value to configure the project.
Is there a way I can configure CMAKE_INSTALL_DOCDIR to use custom prefix but still keep the project name set by the CMake project?

Configure automatic excluded directories and other directory types when they are present

In the Community Edition when I import a module IntelliJ goes through and tries to figure out which directories are what types. The modules I deal with sometimes have a src and a test directory, which work fine, but more often than not the test directory is actually named tst. IntelliJ likes to mark is as a "Sources" directory rather than "Tests". With the tools I am working with, the dependency configuration and generation of the .iml file happens after this, as well as using a modified build system that is not IntelliJ supported. I have to build via commandline which generates a build folder which I would like to have automatically excluded.
So a couple questions.
Can I configure IntelliJ to automatically recognize different folder names "Tests" and mark them as such?
Can I configure IntelliJ to automatically mark a folder as excluded when it is present in a module?
You can't configure it, the list is hard-coded. However, I've added "tst" to the list of names that are recognized as test source roots; that fix will be included in IntelliJ IDEA 14.1.
You can add "build" to Settings | File Types | Files and folders to ignore. Then IntelliJ will ignore the directories and files named "build" anywhere in your project structure. Given that "build" is a fairly common name, this may or may not be what you want.

How to add custom content to a CMake project?

We recently started switching over from using plain visual studio projects to using proper CMake files. Previously we would have the "Content" folder in the solution root folder to allow our executables to access content from it using a relative path like "../Tiles/tileset1.png".
How could we make sure CMake copies the files correctly, or in some other way makes sure that our executables are able to find the content folder while debugging from Visual Studio without manually setting the working directory?
I can think of a few different options:
Have CMake put all your executables in the same folder, as described in this question. Then you can use ../Tiles or ../../Tiles or whatever as you've been doing. Note, however, that you might want to consider setting this on a per-target basis instead of globally, e.g., using:
set_target_properties(
my_target
PROPERTIES
RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/bin
)
Setting CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY works fine, but some people consider it to be the 'old' way of doing it. (Depending on your needs, you might also want to set LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, and possibly ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY.)
Use an environmental variable (e.g., CONTENT_ROOT or some-such) to locate the resources. Hard-code a default that makes sense for production, but let developers override it for their particular work flow.
Look into cross-platform resource libaries (something like Qt's QRC files, but perhaps not tied to Qt).
Try the CMake modules listed in this FAQ answer to change Visual Studio's working/debugging directory.
Actually, a combination of 1 and 2 is probably your best bet...