question about compiling

[Derek Atkins]

John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> writes:

> On Aug 10, 2014, at 7:48 PM, Andrew Schein <andrew at andrewschein.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all -
>> 
>> I have been toying around with gnucash sources for the first time, and was
>> interested to know if there are existing practices for fast compilation?
>> For example, "make install" takes 30 seconds even if nothing has changed.
>> Is there a fast way to iterate code changes and test?
>> 
>
> You can cd to the subdirectory where you're working and run make &&
> make check. That's way faster than building all of GnuCash and
> installing it, but it depends on there being good test
> coverage. Unfortunately for most of GnuCash that means you need to
> write tests before you start changing things. GnuCash is huge and
> doesn't run from the build directory, so if you need to test the whole
> application you're pretty much stuck with a rather long
> edit-build-install-test cycle.

Moreover, if you're only changing C files (and not header files), then
you can often just "make && make check && make install" from the
specific directory you're working in.  I.e., you don't necessarily need
to rebuild/install the entire project.

(I'll also add that 30s for "make install" is pretty darn fast.  On
Win32 it can take minutes, or more).

> Regards,
> John Ralls

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available