NetBeans – Building the Program

Before debugging, the program needed to be built. Within NetBeans, the IBCP project was created and the IBCP source code was checked out of the CVS repository. The .h include files were added in the project under Header files and the .cpp source files were added under Source files. If NetBeans proves satisfactory, the necessary NetBeans files will be included with the source files.

First, some options were set in NetBeans to simply the default directory structure, which assumes a multiple platform product - only Windows is being used here. By default, programs built are put into the directory “dist\Debug\MinGW-Windows” (for the debug configuration, “Release” for the release configuration). This is unnecessary and inconvenient.  To make it build ibcp.exe in the root IBCP directory, the option in Project Properties, Linker, Output was changed to just ibcp from the more involved default ${CND_DISTDIR}/${CND_CONF}/${CND_PLATFORM}/ibcp.

Selecting build project immediately generated errors. The first file was opened and it looked as if it was double spaced (back-slash terminated line continuations caused the errors since the blank line prematurely terminated the line). Somehow in most of the source files, a control-M got added to the end of each line. This is a Unix vs. DOS test file format issue – Unix puts a single newline (control-J or linefeed) at the end of each line and DOS (Windows) puts a CRLF (control-M/control-J) at the end of each line. Vim deals with this invisibly and the GCC compilers ignore it.

I first noticed a week ago that these CRLF were in some of the source files when I did a “cvs diff” command it showed the whole file had changed. Outputting the diff into a file and looking at it with Vim showed the problem was all the lines from one file had “^M” characters at the end of each line, therefore causing no lines to compare. This was causing no problems with either Vim or the compiler.

After some playing around, the problem was discovered to be caused by CVSNT needed by NetBeans (more on this later), which seems to get confused by Unix format files in the repository. The first attempt was to convert all the files to Unix format, but this did not help. After all the files were converted to DOS format, the problem appeared to be solved. Further checkouts were OK. The program then built with no issues. Tests ran as last released. Now on to debugging...