Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that this copyright notice appears in all copies. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
We wrote tmake because we spent too much time maintaining makefiles for Windows and Unix compilers. Being the developer of the multi-platform GUI toolkit Qt, Troll Tech must provide Qt makefiles for more than 30 different OS/compiler combinations.
We looked at GNU autoconf, but it was Unix-specific and not flexible enough in our opinion. Our makefile system also had to deal with Qt meta object compiler (moc) issues. The moc program extracts meta information from C++ files and generates a C++ file with data tables etc. It takes work to add makefile rules for the moc and wanted to automate this task.
The tmake project was started around mid 1996 and version 1.0 was released in September 1997. It soon became a success and is now widely used among Qt programmers.
tmake is written in Perl and requires perl version 5 or newer. You do not need to be familiar with Perl programming to use tmake, but you should learn Perl if you want to write your own makefile templates.
Windows users: The tmake distribution for Win32 includes tmake.exe (built by the perl2exe utility) and you do not need to download and install perl unless you want to modify the tmake source code or run other perl scripts. You can download perl for Win32 (Windows NT and 95) from www.activestate.com
Feedback is highly appreciated. Contact the author hanord@troll.no if you have ideas, patches etc. for tmake.
Unix Bourne shell:
TMAKEPATH=/local/tmake/lib/linux-g++ PATH=$PATH:/local/tmake/bin export TMAKEPATH PATHUnix C shell:
setenv TMAKEPATH /local/tmake/lib/linux-g++ setenv PATH $PATH:/local/tmake/binWindows NT and Windows 95:
set TMAKEPATH=c:\tmake\lib\win32-msvc set PATH=%PATH%;c:\tmake\bin
The template directory name has the form platform-compiler. Each template directory contains template files and a configuration file.
Supported platforms: AIX, Data General, FreeBSD, HPUX, SGI Irix, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OSF1/DEC, SCO, Solaris, SunOS, Ultrix, Unixware and Win32.
Have a look at the tmake/lib directory to see if your platform-compiler combination is supported. If it's not there, please tell us.
Unix users: tmake requires that perl is in /usr/bin. If your version of perl is elsewehere, either change the first line of tmake or make a small shell script which invokes tmake with the correct perl.
HEADERS = hello.h SOURCES = hello.cpp main.cpp TARGET = helloThen run tmake to create a Makefile:
tmake hello.pro -o MakefileAnd finally:
makeThis builds the hello program. Remember to set the
TMAKEPATH
environment variable before you run tmake.
See Makefile for Linux/g++.
See Makefile for Win32/msvc
(Microsoft Visual C++).
TMAKEPATH
environment variable tells tmake where to find
these files:
app.t | Creates a makefile for building applications. | ||
lib.t | Creates a makefile for building libraries. | ||
subdirs.t | Creates a makefile for building targets in subdirectories. | ||
tmake.conf | This configuration file contains compiler options and lists tools and libraries. |
The hello.pro project file above does not have a TEMPLATE
or
a CONFIG
tag. The default template is app (the .t
extension is optional) and the default configuration is qt warn_on
release.
This project file produces exactly the same result as the hello.pro
above:
TEMPLATE = app CONFIG = qt warn_on release HEADERS = hello.h SOURCES = hello.cpp main.cpp TARGET = hello
The CONFIG
tag is recognized by both the app.t and lib.t
templates and specifies what compiler options to use and which extra
libraries to link in.
These options control the compilation flags:
release | Compile with optimization enabled, ignored if "debug" is specified. | ||
debug | Compile with debug options enabled. | ||
warn_on | The compiler should emit more warnings than normally, ignored if "warn_off" is specified. | ||
warn_off | The compiler should emit no warnings or as few as possible. |
These options defines the application/library type:
qt | The target is a Qt application/library and requires Qt header files/library. | ||
opengl | The target requires the OpenGL (or Mesa) headers/libraries. | ||
x11 | The target is a X11 application (app.t only). | ||
windows | The target is a Win32 window application (app.t only). | ||
console | The target is a Win32 console application (app.t only). | ||
dll | The target is a shared object/DLL (app.t only). | ||
staticlib | The target is a static library (lib.t only). |
As an example, if the hello application uses both Qt and OpenGL and you
want to compile it for debugging, your CONFIG
line should
read:
CONFIG = qt opengl debug
The most common tmake options and project tags are described here. See the tmake reference manual for details.
HEADERS | Header files. | ||
SOURCES | Source files. | ||
TARGET | Name of executable (adds .exe if on Windows). | ||
DESTDIR | Where to put the target. | ||
DEFINES | Tell compiler to define C preprocessor macros (-D option). | ||
INCLUDEPATH | Sets the include file search path for the compiler (-I option). | ||
DEPENDPATH | Sets the dependency search path for tmake. | ||
DEF_FILE | Win32 only: Link with a .def file. | ||
RC_FILE | Win32 only: Use a .rc file (compile to temporary .res). | ||
RES_FILE | Win32 only: Link with a .res file. |
The lib.t template supports the same project tags as app.t, but also
VERSION
. VERSION
is the version number of the
target library, e.g. 1.40. The version is important for Unix shared
libraries, but ignored on Windows.
The SUBDIRS
tag contains the name of all subdirectories to
be processed.
vcapp.t | Creates an application project file (Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 only). | ||
vclib.t | Creates a library project file (Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 only). |
Run tmake to create a hello.dsp file (use -t to override the default template):
tmake -t vcapp -o hello.dsp hello.pro
tmake [options] project-fileOptions:
-e expr Evaluate the Perl expression. Ignores the template file. -nodepend Don't generate dependency information. -o file Write output to file instead of stdout. -p file Load an additional project file. -t file Specify a template file. -unix Force tmake into Unix mode. -v Verbose/debugging on. -win32 Force tmake into Win32 mode.The -t option overrides any
TEMPLATE
tag in the project file.
The default project file extension is ".pro". The default template file extension is ".t". If you do not specify these extension tmake will automatically add them for you.
progen -n hello -o hello.proIf no .cpp or .h files are specified on the command line, progen searches for .cpp and .h (except moc_*.cpp) in the current directory and below.
Usage:
progen [options] [C/C++ header files and source files]Options:
-lower Lower-case letters in filenames (useful on Windows).
-n name Specify a project name (TARGET
).
-o file Write output to file instead of stdout.
-t file Specify a template file.
solaris-cc:TMAKE_CC = /opt/bin/CC_5.0 solaris-cc:TMAKE_CFLAGS = -pts unix:TMAKE_LIBS = -lXext win32:INCLUDE_PATH = c:\myinclude win32-borland:DEFINES = NO_BOOLYou can prefix a project tag with unix: or win32: to make it specific for either Unix or Windows. You can also prefix tags with platform-compiler
HEADERS
, SOURCES
etc.
All tags and values are stored in a global associative Perl hash
array called project
. For example,
$project{"SOURCES"}
contains "hello.cpp main.cpp"
after processing hello.pro.
When both the tmake.conf and the project files have been
read, tmake starts reading the template file line by line and
executes any Perl code it finds in the template.
#$
until newline is
evaluated as perl code. The perl code is substituted
with the contents of the $text
variable.
#${
until
#$}
.
#!
until newline is stripped.
Example:
#! This is a comment which will be removed. This text will appear in the output. #$ $text = "The header file(s) are: " . $project{"HEADERS"}; # This text also appears in the output. #${ $a = 12; $b = 13; $text = $a * $b; #$} That's all.Output:
This text will appear in the output. The header file(s) are: hello.h # This text also appears in the output. 156 That's all.
Parser template:
#! #! parser.t: This is a custom template for building a parser #! #$ IncludeTemplate("app.t"); ####### Lex/yacc programs and options LEX = flex YACC = #$ $text = ($is_unix ? "yacc -d" : "byacc -d"); ####### Lex/yacc files LEXIN = #$ Expand("LEXINPUT"); LEXOUT = lex.yy.c YACCIN = #$ Expand("YACCINPUT"); YACCOUT = y.tab.c YACCHDR = y.tab.h PARSER = #$ Expand("PARSER"); ####### Process lex/yacc files $(LEXOUT): $(LEXIN) $(LEX) $(LEXIN) $(PARSER): $(YACCIN) $(LEXOUT) $(YACC) $(YACCIN) #$ $text = ($is_unix ? "-rm -f " : "-del ") . '$(PARSER)'; #$ $text = ($is_unix ? "-mv " : "-ren ") . '$(YACCOUT) $(PARSER)';The parser template adds some extra rules to the application template in order to build the lex and yacc portions of the project. This template is portable across Unix and Windows since it generates different commands depending on the
$is_unix
variable.
To learn more about the Expand() function and other Perl functions which tmake provides, consult the reference manual.
Example project file:
TEMPLATE = parser.t CONFIG = console release LEXINPUT = lexer.l YACCINPUT = grammar.y PARSER = parser.cpp SOURCES = $$PARSER \ node.cpp \ asmgen.cpp TARGET = parserHere we use macro expansion
$$PARSER
to avoid writing parser.cpp
two places.
Template wc.t:
#! Template that count number of C++ lines. The number of C++ code lines for #$ $text=$project_name; #${ $files = $project{"HEADERS"} . " " . $project{"SOURCES"}; $text = `wc -l $files`; #$}Run it:
tmake -t wc helloOutput:
The number of C++ code lines for hello.pro 25 hello.h 98 hello.cpp 38 main.cpp 161 totalThis will only work if the wc program is installed on your system.