New Make System

The standalone make file was originally generated by a feature in NetBeans, and was heavily modified to make it work, but it never looked very clean. Some consideration was given to rewriting it using the proper make rules (having individual build rules for each individual source file is not the way make is suppose to be utilized).

Continuing to use the make system within NetBeans was not desirable, though it allows the setup to deal with multiple platforms (Linux and Windows). A reason for not using it is that releasing all the associated files is not really an ideal option. And it never really worked right for the auto-generated include files from the awk scripts - warnings were generated for every build and no solution for eliminating these warnings was ever found (perhaps this was a bug in 6.9.1 that may have been fixed in 7.0).

Using the GNU autotools was out of the question - way too complicated and too much time coming up to speed with it. Instead the CMake system (Cross platform make generator) will be used as it is far simpler to setup and use. Plus NetBeans is supposed to understand CMake files. Adding CMake on Kubuntu installed version 2.8.2, however, this version did not contain the ccmake user interface for configuring the build. So the Linux source for version 2.8.4 (the latest) was downloaded (from here) and installed.

There are two prerequisite packages that are required to build the text CCMake GUI (more on this later), which are the libncurses5 and libncurses5-dev packages. These can be installed with this command:

sodu apt-get install <package-name>

Upgrade to NetBeans 7.0

Netbeans 7.0 was recently released (version 6.9.1 was being used for development on Windows), which contains support for git via a plug-in. Getting that to work took some research and experimentation. It appeared that the git plug-in only allowed creating a new git repository, not opening an existing one. However, it was discovered that if a new project is created from existing source and standalone make file in a directory with a git repository, NetBeans will then see the repository.

There was a problem building the project. The compiler complained that it didn't recognize the -static-libstdc++ option. NetBeans was still executing GCC 4.4.5, even though it was correctly pointing to the GCC 4.6.0 directory. Setting the path to include GCC 4.6.0 before executing NetBeans from the command line did not help.

Next an attempt was made to run the debugger on the project. There was no debug option in the standalone make file. Previously, the project was set up under NetBeans and it generated its own complex and convoluted set of files for generating what it needed to build the project. Both a Release and a Debug configuration was created by NetBeans. To release the project, NetBeans was used to create a standalone make file instead of releasing all the NetBeans files, which would have required NetBeans to build.

This time around, NetBeans was given this (heavily modified) make file when the project was created, though there was no Debug configuration. The make file was temporarily modified to turn on debug compiling. The make system needs to be reworked to allow both a release and debug configuration without using the system built into NetBeans.