Re: [Boost-build] Using custom generators

From: Kirill Lapshin (kir_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-03-13 05:36:34

John, I think core boost.build developers are very busy trying to kick 
1.34.0 out of the door, hence the slow response rate.

I suppose you are trying to put together ANTLR support, right? I for one 
would like to get proper ANTLR support in boost.build, but never had 
enough time/enthusiasm to learn boost.build internals and build proper 
solution. However I would be happy to help out with testing etc.

At the moment I have quick and dirty solution -- basically I modeled 
ANTLR support after whale toolset, which works reasonably well in the 
scope of single project, provided you can enforce some rules on file 
names, e.g. foo.g should produce foo_lexer.cpp/hpp and 
foo_parser.cpp/hpp. I realize that it is not a proper solution, but may 
work for you as a stop gap measure.

HTH

John Reid wrote:
> ping!
> 
> John Reid wrote:
>> Suppose I have a tool that compiles files of type .g into .cpp .hpp and 
>> .txt files. The names of these generated files can not be determined 
>> from the filename of the source .g file.
>>
>> I can register the .g type and create a rule and an action to run the 
>> tool. I am having problems using custom generators to tell boost.build 
>> which files the tool will generate.
>>
>> I've looked at the documentation:
>> http://www.boost.org/doc/html/bbv2/extending/tools.html
>>
>> and I figured the quickest and easiest way to do this is to define 
>> features that are set on each .g source file and then inspect them in 
>> the generated-targets rule of the custom generator. Does this sound 
>> sensible?
>>
>> Given the above I've struggled to work out how to return appropriate 
>> values from the custom generator rule. The documentation does not seem 
>> to cover this at all. Could someone provide me with example code to 
>> extract a filename from a feature and build a suitable return value for 
>> the generated-targets rule from it?
>>