False and misleading information

Eclipse moved from 3.7 right up to 4.2, and it includes Lua now as well, so I thought I’d have a quick go at trying it out on some C projects again. It was less than awesome, but well, that’s eclipse I guess.

I chose File->New->”Makefile project with existing sources”, and selected the path to my project. I can’t find a combined “clean and build” but I cleaned and built, and it all mostly sort of worked.

Except, it completely failed to recognise the -I and -L flags from my Makefile. Which are important. That’s why they’re there. So, it builds, but you can’t navigate to any of the libraries you’re using, and your screen is full of red errors about undefined fields.

Under Project Properties->C/C++ build->Discovery options, there’s an unchecked setting for “Automate discovery…” but checking it just produces a warning that this is deprecated, and to use, “Preprocessor include paths, macros, etc” Good fucking job eclipse. Why have an option that you’ve decided to remove.

So, Project Properties->C/C++ General->Preprocessor include paths… (What’s the difference between build and general? fuck knows, classic eclipse UI design) And then “CDT GCC Build Output Parser”

Now, I never would have actually found this, but they have this pattern that’s apparently meant to help it find the calls to GCC in the makefile output. The default is (gcc)|([gc]\+\+)|(clang)

Now, on linux, by default, “cc” is gcc. and if you don’t override the CC variable in your own makefile, it will be invoked as cc. Which eclipse then completely ignores. I know that it’s not a good idea to always assume that cc is gcc, but hey, if it detected nothing when I ran the build, perhaps it should offer some other alternatives? Perhaps it should try and run cc and look at it’s version? Perhaps it should follow the symlinks?

If you want to fix it, use this text instead (gcc)|([gc]\+\+)|(clang)|(cc)
Then do a clean, a build, then right click your project, chose index, and choose rebuild.

Presto. The eclipse way.