[RFC] Buildtools and Language Support

Andreas Pakulat apaku at gmx.de
Thu Jul 12 20:26:29 UTC 2007


Hi,

Roberto already mentioned this somewhere in the "qmake third iteration"
thread.

Buildsystems such as qmake, cmake and even automake (especially the
autoconf part) have a simple programming language to do "advanced"
things (like creating dependecies between different subprojects,
executing commands to generate source....). So I (and obviously also
Roberto) am thinking: Why don't we create language plugins for such
advanced buildsystems?

Reasoning: We already create parsers for each language and AST's, we
also build structures on top of that to resolve variable values,
evaluate certain functions (cmake macro's, qmake functions). So IMHO
we're already doing pretty much everything a language plugin for the
qmake or cmake language would do. A DUChain for QMake or CMake files may
help to ease the implementation of these things, I think and maybe even
implementing the "typing-help" that seemingly both CMake and QMake
support are aiming at for advanced project buildsystems.

I'm not sure wether this would be 2 separate plugins or wether its just
one plugin implementing both buildsystem and language API. 

So what do those that already worked on language plugins in KDevelop4
think about it? Does it make sense? Am I overlooking thins in both
language and buildsystem support that make this unpleasant or
impossible?

Andreas

-- 
Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.




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