Question

Often when I’m working on a project with others, the amount of library paths and include paths that get sourced by the compiler in the Makefile get more numerous as time goes by. Also the paths can get very long as well.

Here’s an example:

g++ -c -pipe -O2 -Wall -W -DQT_BOOTSTRAPPED -DQT_MOC -DQT_NO_CODECS
-DQT_LITE_UNICODE -DQT_NO_LIBRARY -DQT_NO_STL -DQT_NO_COMPRESS
-DQT_NO_DATASTREAM -DQT_NO_TEXTSTREAM -DQT_NO_TEXTCODEC -DQT_NO_UNICODETABLES
-DQT_NO_THREAD -DQT_NO_REGEXP -DQT_NO_QOBJECT -DQT_NO_SYSTEMLOCALE
-DQT_NO_GEOM_VARIANT -DQT_NO_USING_NAMESPACE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -I../../../mkspecs/qws/linux-generic-g++ -I.
-I../../corelib/arch/generic -I../../../include -I. -I../../../include/QtCore
-I. -I.uic/release-shared -o release-shared/moc.o moc.cpp

I’m wondering what kind of recipes you use to make compiler lines much shorter, while still giving the user the option to display the raw lines if they really need that information later.

Are there tools that do this automatically?

Answer 1

How about using environment variables?

export LONGPATH=/usr/local/projects/include/foo/system/v1
gcc foo.c -o foo -I$LONGPATH

For more complex scenarios, one can use wrappers to invoke the compiler, so that the actual commands and their parameters only show up on errors or warnings.
Using cmake for example, much of the conventional output is already downstripped heavily.

Similarly, there’s the possibility to use spec files with gcc.