Re: [cedet-semantic] telling semantic about project include directories

[David E. <de...@ra...>]

Brendan Miller writes:
> There seem to be interfaces for specifying "system" include
> directories (semantic-add-system-include), but I don't really see any
> for project level stuff.

That is what EDE is for. :-)

Semantic knows about system includes, since those are usually always
needed and are not depending on a notion of a 'project' (you can use
them with single files).

You can skip EDE setup if you're working with very simple setups, like
when all files are in one directory, or if you use relative path names
in #include directives.

But as soon as you're creating slightly more complex projects, you will
need EDE. Again, for simple cases you can use canned projects like
ede-cpp-root-project. For complex projects, where includes are scattered
all over the place, I usually use `ede-locate-global' and/or
`ede-locate-locate' so that I don't have to specify every include
directory manually.

> There's a semanticdb-project-roots function, but setting this doesn't
> seem to let semantic properly infer the include path. I'm wondering if
> there's a way to set the project include path explicitly.

I don't think so. `semanticdb-project-roots' can be a bit confusing;
Semantic will not look by default in those directories for
includes. Like the name says, all this variable does is hold directories
which are roots of separate(!) projects. That means, if you put

/home/user/myproject

in there, and you load a file /home/user/myproject/subdir/test.c, then
Semantic will know that this file is part of that project and load the
corresponding table of that directory. Hence, it doesn't make sense to
explicitly put 'include' directories in there.

Maybe it would make sense to have a separate variable to hold include
directories. There actually is `semantic-dependency-include-path';
however, the doc-string says this should be obsoleted, so I guess Eric
doesn't want to replicate functionality here.

> The internal structure of my project is a little complex, so I'm think
> that might have something to do with why semantic isn't guessing the
> include path.

Even a very minimal EDE setup will get you a long way. For example:

(ede-cpp-root-project "whatever" :file "~/myproject/test.cpp"
		      :include-path '( "/include" "/submodule/include" )
		      :system-include-path '( "/usr/include/" ))

;; Also use 'locate' to find includes.
(setq ede-locate-setup-options
       '(ede-locate-locate
 	ede-locate-base))


Cheers,
David