tmake User's Guide

License Statement

Copyright (C) 1996-1998 by Troll Tech AS. All rights reserved.

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.

Introduction

tmake is an easy-to-use tool for creating and maintaining makefiles across many platforms and compilers. The idea is that you should spend your time writing code, not makefiles.

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.

Installation

  1. Make sure you have perl version 5 or later installed (optional for Windows users).
  2. Unpack the tmake tar.gz or zip archive.
  3. Set the TMAKEPATH environment variable to the directories containing the template files (see below).
  4. Add the tmake/bin directory to your PATH.
Here are some examples:

Unix Bourne shell:

    TMAKEPATH=/local/tmake/lib/linux-g++
    PATH=$PATH:/local/tmake/bin
    export TMAKEPATH PATH
Unix C shell:
    setenv TMAKEPATH /local/tmake/lib/linux-g++
    setenv PATH $PATH:/local/tmake/bin
Windows 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.

Getting Started

Let's assume you have a small Qt application consisting of one C++ header file and two source files. First you need to create a project file, e.g. hello.pro:
  HEADERS   =  hello.h
  SOURCES   =  hello.cpp main.cpp
  TARGET    =  hello
Then run tmake to create a Makefile:
  tmake hello.pro -o Makefile
And finally:
  make
This 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++).

Makefile Templates

The tmake distribution includes three makefile templates and one configuration file for each platform/compiler combination. The 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

Makefile Configuration

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.

The Application Template

The application template, app.t, lets you compile and link executable programs or shared objects (DLLs). This template recognizes several tags.

  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 Library Template

The library template, lib.t, lets you compile and create static or shared libraries.

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 Template

The subdirs template, subdirs.t, lets you invoke make in subdirectories.

The SUBDIRS tag contains the name of all subdirectories to be processed.

Special Templates for Microsoft Visual C++

If you have Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, you can use two special templates to generate a MSVC++ IDE project (.dsp file). After you have generated e.g. hello.dsp, choose "File"->"Open Workspace" and select the hello.dsp file. Visual C++ will then create a workspace (.dsw file) for you.

  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

Program Usage: tmake

Usage:
  tmake [options] project-file
Options:
  -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.

The progen Utility

The progen utility creates project files for you. It can be used like this:
  progen -n hello -o hello.pro
If 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.

Advanced Topics

In most cases you will be happy with using tmake as described above, but sometimes you need to add special compiler options or even add new makefile rules. This chapter describes how to customize your makefiles.

Conditional Project Settings

If you need a special compiler option etc., you can add platform-dependent settings in your project 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_BOOL
You 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

Your Own Templates

If you know Perl programming, there is virtually no limitation to what you can do with tmake. First you need to know how tmake works.

Template Processing

When you run tmake, it first reads the tmake.conf file. This configuration file has the same syntax as the project file. tmake then reads the project file and sets the project tags it finds, e.g. 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.

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.

Using tmake With Lex and Yacc

The standard tmake templates knows how to process C and C++ files, but sometimes you need to process additional files and link them into your project. A typical example is to process lex and yacc files when you're building a parser.

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   = $$PARSER    \
              node.cpp    \
              asmgen.cpp
  TARGET    = parser
Here we use macro expansion $$PARSER to avoid writing parser.cpp two places.

Counting the Number of Code Lines

tmake is generic since it is based on Perl. You can create your own templates for other purposes than producing makefiles. Here is an example template that counts the number of code lines in our project.

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 hello
Output:
  The number of C++ code lines for hello.pro
       25    hello.h
       98    hello.cpp
       38    main.cpp
      161    total
This will only work if the wc program is installed on your system.