[cdt-dev] building projects prior to a launch

[John Cortell <rat042@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When building before launching, CDT tries to build not only the project
reference in the launch configuration but also any projects that
that project references (and so on down the chain). That just
doesn't seem right to me, simply because the relationship between such
projects is inadequately defined. The relationships are made possible by
the platform[1] and the platform is clueless with regards to CDT's
concept of build configurations. So while the platform lets us say that
project A references project B, it doesn't allow us to say that
{projectA, configuration 'Debug'} references {project B, configuration
'Debug'}. And without that sort of more detailed relationship, I think
it's pointless to try to initiate a build of all projects referenced by
A.  Doing so will initiate a build of B but it will build whatever
configuration is active for that project, and it's luck if that happens
to be the appropriate one.

So, my suggestion is to simply build the project referenced in the launch
configuration, and specifically the build configuration specified in the
launch configuration, and to hell with any projects that such project
references :-) This until we come up with a way to more precisely tie two
CDT projects.

A compromise may be to consider that all referenced projects might have
configurations of the same name, and build the specified configuration
where available, otherwise whichever one is active for the project. I
really don't like this since it provides expected behavior for people who
use consistent configuration names in all their projects, but different
behavior for others.

Thoughts?

John

[1] See project Properties > Project References