ar on an existing .a file? - unix

Essentially, what I want to do is this:
gcc foo.c -o foo.o
ar rcs foo.a foo.o
gcc bar.c -o boo.o
ar rcs bar.a bar.o foo.a
I want to archive both an object and a static library into another static library. Unfortunately, the last command doesn't end up containing foo.o (it contains bar.o and foo.a), so when I get to the linking stage, the linker can't find the symbols from foo.o.
Is there a way to do what I want here? I'm doing all of this out of make, so I'm looking for a solution that doesn't involve extracting & re-archiving the objects (which seems kinda painful). Is there a way to make this kind of "archive from another archive" setup work?

Actually, you do not want to archive one whole '.a' file inside another. You might want to archive the members of the one archive in the other - but that is a wholly different operation.
The 'ar' program is perfectly capable of storing source files, gzipped tar files, HTML files, XML files, and pretty much any other type of file in the '.a' (and the '.a' suffix is only conventional, not mandatory) -- try it some time. However, it treats object files (and only object files) specially, and makes them available for use by the linker ('ld'), but the linker only uses such files if the extension is '.a'.
So, you want to have two libraries:
foo.a containing just foo.o
bar.a containing bar.o and all the objects from foo.a
Short of doing as you suggest and extracting the objects from foo.a and building them into bar.a, the only alternative is to list the members of foo.a as members of bar.a too:
FOO_OBJS = foo.o
BAR_OBJS = bar.o $(FOO_OBJS)
foo.a: $(FOO_OBJS)
$(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $# $(FOO_OBJS)
bar.a: $(BAR_OBJS)
$(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $# $(BAR_OBJS)
I am assuming that your example is minimized. If it is not, then why bother with two libraries. Anything that uses just code from foo.o will only link foo.o even if given bar.a to link with. (It would be slightly different if these were shared objects, but it would probably still be better to use just one rather than two shared objects.)

ar rcs foo.a foo.o
cp foo.a foo2.a
gcc -c bar.c
ar rs foo2.a bar.o
And perhaps use foo.a instead of foo2.a if you don't need to keep it in its original form.

Related

Make rule using `$<` only adding one object to archive library

I feel stupid, but I cannot find the solution myself:
I have a Makefile that correctly builds objects from C source, and I want to place $(OBJECTS) in an archive library.
I'm using GNU Make 4.0.
x.a: $(OBJECTS)
echo "$< ($(OBJECTS))"
$(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $# $<
(Lines are indented with TABs in original. The echo was added for debugging purposes only, The $(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $# $< was copied from make's internal rules)
Make outputs (at the end after the objects were built):
echo "log_thread/log_thread.o (log_thread/log_thread.o log_thread/thread.o)"
log_thread/log_thread.o (log_thread/log_thread.o log_thread/thread.o)
ar rv x.a log_thread/log_thread.o
ar: creating x.a
a - log_thread/log_thread.o
So I expect both objects modules to be added to the library x.a, but $< only contains one object module, as opposed to $(OBJECTS)).
My Make knowledge may be a little rusty, maybe that's why I don't get it.
Of course both object modules exist, and the output was created after having removed x.a (the original file is a bit more complex).
I'm not sure where the confusion lies:
The $< automatic variable contains the first prerequisite only, as per definition.
See the GNU make manual.
To get all prerequisites newer than the target, $? is the correct automatic variable.
So the correct rule probably is:
x.a: $(OBJECTS)
echo "$? ($(OBJECTS))"
$(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $# $?

How can a Makefile replacement pattern produce more than one output per input?

In our code base we have a code generator which takes foo.xyz and produces two source files foo-in.c and foo-out.c.
In an application's Makefile I would like to list the sources as:
SOURCES=main.c gadget.c foo.xyz
Then the corresponding OBJECTS variable should expand to:
OBJECTS=main.o gadget.o foo-in.o foo-out.o
but I'm unable to find whether it is possible to do this expansion generically using GNU Make. The common $(SOURCES:.c=.o) replacement pattern replaces a single source file with a single object file.
How can I write a substitution pattern which will produce multiple output files per input file?
Well, while writing the question I found a usable solution.
SOURCES=main.c gadget.c foo.xyz
OBJECTS=$(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(filter %.c,$(SOURCES))) \
$(patsubst %.xyz,%-in.o,$(filter %.xyz,$(SOURCES))) \
$(patsubst %.xyz,%-out.o,$(filter %.xyz,$(SOURCES)))
app: $(OBJECTS)
$(LD) -o $# $(LDFLAGS) $(OBJECTS)
%-in.c %-out.c: %.xyz
# Very special codegen rule
touch $(patsubst %.xyz,%-in.c,$<)
touch $(patsubst %.xyz,%-out.c,$<)
When converting from $(SOURCES) to $(OBJECTS) use two separate patsubst calls to the filteres out .xyz files. This way, both the %-in.o and %-out.o files ends up in the object list.
Another solution could be to create an intermediate sources list using the same trick but substituting xyz with the corresponding -in.c and -out.c patterns. Then the objects list could be created in the traditional way. An added benefit of this method would be that creating a rule which generates all source code files is trivial.

How to define a rule with a recursive recipe in GNU make?

I want to call make files in subfolders from one top make file.
An example of my top make file that works looks like this, where buildPath is a parameter in to the make script:
.PHONY: testSystem
testSystem:
$(MAKE) all -C $(buildPath)/Test1Build
$(MAKE) all -C $(buildPath)/Test2Build
$(MAKE) all -C $(buildPath)/Test3Build
The problem with this solution is that I have to list all subfolders; Test1Build, Test2Build, Test3Build etc.
Is there a way (with make) to define this rule in such a way that the subfolders in the receipt are recursively found without having to list them all?
...or can I solve this problem in a totally different way?
All subfolders begins with Test and ends with Build as a pattern.
It's not hard at all. One simple way:
testSystem:
for d in $(buildPath)/*/.; do \
$(MAKE) all -C $$d; \
done
However, that has many problems. Much more reliable and robust will be this:
subdirs := $(wildcard $(buildPath)/*/.)
testSystem: $(subdirs)
$(subdirs):
$(MAKE) -C $# all
.PHONY: testSystem $(subdirs)
One caveat: if you use parallel make (-j) then you may run into problems with the second solution if the results of the subdirectories depend on each other. If they do then you'll have to declare these dependency relationships in your makefile:
$(buildPath)/foo/. : $(buildPath)/bar/.
etc.

Running make from Outside the Tree

Let's say I have a makefile like the following:
CXXFLAGS := -I./Include
Foo:
$(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) -o Foo
If the user cds into the source tree and runs make, everything is fine and dandy. However, if make is invoked from somewhere outside the source tree, the include directory will be incorrect.
Using full paths instead of relative paths works, but that destroys the portability of the makefile.
Should I just rely on users invoking make "properly?" Or is there an easy way to get around this?
If you want to have CXXFLAGS be -Isome_dir/Include
when the make is invoked asmake -f some_dir/Makefile,
MAKEFILE_LIST
might meet the purpose.
For example:
MAKEFILE_DIR := $(dir $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))
CXXFLAGS := -I$(MAKEFILE_DIR)Include
If your make's version is 3.80 or lower, lastword might not work.
In that case,
$(word $(words $(MAKEFILE_LIST)),$(MAKEFILE_LIST)) will work instead.
EDIT: This answer is for GNU-make.
Use the -C flag.
make -C my_dir
You could present your users a compile command that looks like (cd /to/proper/directory && make -k)

Make source with two targets

I use this tool called Lazy C++ which breaks a single C++ .lzz file into a .h and .cpp file. I want Makepp to expect both of these files to exist after my rule for building .lzz files, but I'm not sure how to put two targets into a single build line.
I've never used Makepp personally, but since it's a drop-in replacement for GNU Make, you should be able to do something like:
build: foo.h foo.cpp
g++ $(CFLAGS) foo.cpp -o $(LFLAGS) foo
foo.h foo.cpp: foo.lzz
lzz foo.lzz
Also not sure about the lzz invocation there, but that should help. You can read more about this at http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/gnu/make/make_37.html.
Lzz is amazing! This is just what I was looking for http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++/browse_thread/thread/c50de73b70a6a957/f3f47fcdcfb6bc09
Actually all you need is to depend (typically) on foo.o in your link rule, and a pattern rule to call lzz:
%.cpp %.h: %.lzz
lzz $(input)
The rest will fall into place automatically. When compiling any source that includes foo.h, or linking foo.o to a library or program, lzz will first get called automatically.
Makepp will also recognize if only the timestamp but not the content of the produced file changed, and ignore that. But it can't hurt to give it less to do, by using the lzz options to suppress recreating an identical file.
Regards -- Daniel

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