Re: [ros-dev] Autogenerating compiler specific .def files

[Colin Finck]

Hi Marc,

Marc Piulachs wrote: 
>   Now if we are going to generate two .def files f.e:
modulename.msvc.spec.def
>   and modulename.gcc.spec.def how we should declare it
> on the 
>  modulename.rbuild? 
I think we should change the <importlibrary> tag to support .spec files
directly.

For example in the module you have: <importlibrary definition="module.spec"
/>
When you compile using the MinGW backend, you will get a file
"module_gcc.def" in the intermediate directory. As rbuild builds the
filename itself, it can simply use it for makefile.auto and expect that the
.spec to .def converter created this file.
When the MSVC backend is used (by calling "make msvc*"), it will create a
file "module_msvc.def" in the intermediate directory.


>   * With my proposed method the def files are created by
>
>  backends on request so on a msvc build only msvc
>  compatible def files would be generated 
Is also possible with the .spec file method (see above).


>   - If you take a look at
> /tools/rbuild/modulehandler.cpp:2506 
>  you will be horrorified to see that both module names are 
>  hardcoded on rbuild which is not good. 
Agreed, this should be handled better, but this is something we can care
about later :-P


>   Last but not least, from my point of view integration
> is 
>  important, We have a fairly complex build tool, all the information
>  we can give to it about the codebase will worth it because more
>  automatic checking we will be able to do and more things we will
>  be able to autogenerate , we should let rbuild itself generate as much
>  things as possible. 
When doing such changes, always remember that rbuild is mainly just a tool
that processes makefile-like files and doesn't compile code files itself.
Also processing XML files is slower compared to processing plain text files.
In this case, there also exists a format that is already used to solve this
problem, so we should really adopt it.

Regards,

Colin