CMake Generator Specific Information

KDevelop3 Generator

KDevelop3 is in alpha state, so use it carefully. Available in CVS as of October 12th 2004. Currently only reported to work in KDevelop 3.0.4.

Beside creating all the same files as UNIX Makefile generator, it creates in the toplevel binary directory files:

Project.kdevelop
Project.kdevelop.filelist

The first one is XML describing the project, while the second one is a list of relative paths to the source files. The source files are grouped based on globbing expression in the XML file.

Here are some random thoughts:

Alex Neundorf wrote a patch for CMake (http://www.cmake.org) that adds KDevelop generator for CMake. What this means is that CMake can generate project files for KDevelop.

That said, we ran into a bit of trouble. The problem is that so far we could not figure out a way for sources to be in one directory and all build files being in another. That includes all KDevelop files.

Why is this good? Well, several reasons. First one, to remove all the build files (generating tar, doing CVS etc, start all over), all you do is to remove build tree. Also, sometimes sources are located in a readonly partition (such as CD-ROM, /usr/share/doc/... etc). Another problem is when you use the same source tree for different build trees. In that case, the source has to provide all KDevelop files, which may not be acceptable.

So, I played with the Alexes patch and managed to get it working by doing the following:

1. Create two files: Project.kdevelop and Project.kdevelop.filelist
2. In Project.kdevelop put all necessary XML stuff including the projectdirectory tag that points to the build tree
3. In the Project.kdevelop.filelist I had relative paths to actual source files

So, it worked fine with couple of problems.

1. I can build fine
2. I can use File Groups to browse through the list of source files
3. CVS, Subversion etc do not work since they try to update build tree
4. File tree shows build tree and I cannot see the source files.

The possible solutions:

1. Write Project.kdevelop.filelist to source tree and point projectdirectory to the source tree

+ simple to implement
+ everything works
- need writable source tree
- you cannot use same source tree for different builds except if exactly the same files are used in all of them (no conditional compiling)

2. Add support for specifying directory for CVS, Subversion, and File tree

+ More clean integration
+ No pollution of source tree
- Require individual settings for all possible modules (CVS, Subversion...)
- Require modification of KDevelop

3. Have actual sourceDirectory and buildDirectory distinction.

+ The cleanest integration
+ No pollution of source tree
- Require modification of KDevelop