[cfe-dev] Tooling RFC: Find build root from source root with a symlink?

[Sam McCall via cfe-dev]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 12:50 PM Roman Lebedev <lebedev.ri at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 1:42 PM Sam McCall via cfe-dev
> <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> > Many projects/build systems have the concept of a "build tree" that can
> be separate from the source tree. (e.g. CMake supports this, and LLVM
> recommends this approach).
> >
> > Tools sometimes need to find the build tree.
> > I'd like to suggest a convention for the Tooling library to support:
> >     If $SRC/buildroot exists, it's the default build directory for the
> source tree $SRC.
> >     Otherwise, the build directory is $SRC itself.
> >     $SRC/buildroot may be a symlink.
> >     Configuration files like compile_commands.json are searched for in
> the build directory.
> > (Bikeshedding the "buildroot" string is welcome. "build" will conflict
> too often, sadly).
> Is "buildroot" supposed to be a hardcoded constant?
>
Yes, I don't mind what the constant is, but this needs to be a constant for
the discovery to work.


> Personally, i have never ever named any of my build dirs that. They
> were always named "build".
>
Unfortunately people also name other types of directories "build", such as
those containing checked-in build scripts.
If you had a project set up with your build-dir as $SRC/build, then you'd
need to ln -s $SRC/build $SRC/buildroot.

Also, what if there are multiple build trees - build-clang-release,
> build-gcc-release, ... ?
>
Source-based tools (clang-tidy, code completion, etc) need to be able to
pick a default configuration without user interaction, for usability.
You should symlink one of these to $SRC/buildroot, to use as the default.
Tools should provide some way to override this default.
(Possibly CMake etc could create this symlink if it doesn't exist, i.e.
when you create the first build dir).

> Implications:
> >  - for /foo/bar/baz.cc, we'd search for compile_commands.json in
> {/foo/bar/buildroot/,/foo/bar/, /foo/buildroot/, etc}. This is
> backwards-compatible.
> >  - where users currently symlink compile_commands.json itself, they
> could create the buildroot symlink instead. This would work in the same
> way, and enable new cases.
> >  - if we implement e.g. a Ninja-backed compilation DB that doesn't need
> compile_commands.json, the same symlink convention would work.
> >  - it provides a simple model for multi-configuration-aware tools: a
> configuration is defined by a build dir, there's a default configuration,
> tools can let the user override the build dir. e.g. clangd can write its
> index files into the build dir instead of the source dir, which is
> multi-configuration-friendly (tinyurl.com/clangd-automatic-index)
> >  - non-clang tools that consume compile_commands.json will need to be
> updated over time.
> >
> > What do you think?
> > Cheers, Sam
> Roman.
>
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