Home/ Questions/Q 425321
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T19:22:03+00:00

I am doing some C programming for school and I have found myself reusing

  • 0

I am doing some C programming for school and I have found myself reusing libraries that I have created, over and over again (stacks, user input, error handling, etc).

Right now, my personal SVN directory structure looks like this:

trunk/
|-- 2520
|   `-- assignments
|       |-- A2
|           |-- Makefile
|           |-- README
|           |-- calculator.c
|           |-- calculatorlib.c
|           `-- calculatorlib.h
`-- libs
    |-- misc
    |   |-- errorlib.c
    |   |-- errorlib.h
    |   |-- userinputlib.c
    |   `-- userinputlib.h
    `-- stacks
        |-- stacklib.c
        `-- stacklib.h

Some of these files (userinputlib and errorlib) get used in almost every project I work on for obvious reasons. I want to be able to include these files in a project’s workspace (2520/assignments/A2) without having to copy the files because I don’t want to manage to copies of a file and I don’t want to check in two copies of the same file in SVN.
I would like to have the library files in the project workspace so my Makefile works without having to do to much manual configuration (or hard-coding paths).

At first, I thought about symbolic links (which SVN and tar support) but I can’t seem to compile my assignment given my headers in another directory.

I can manually compile each header to an object file and do the final linking, but I’m not sure how to do this in a Makefile automatically.

Any help or any alternative to how I have my environment setup is appreciated.

Thanks!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I have searched Google and have found a few pages describing automatic dependency generation (perhaps I want this?) using gcc -MM and I have read over the GNU Make manual but nothing jumped out at me.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use could use subversion’s externals feature to link a dynamic copy of the libs tree as a subdirectory of your project.

    But in the end it may be better to just use a copy (a subversion copy, so it would effectively be a branch of the library code), so that you don’t need to worry about changes to the library affecting existing projects, and can merge changes around as needed.

    • 0