geany-plugin.mk

geany-plugin.mk provides (experimental) easy Make support for building standalone Geany plugins. This does not aim at being as powerful as can be "real" build systems like Autotools, CMake or others, but intent to be simple, powerful enough and very easy to setup.

One particular thing it intentionally doesn't support is the environment detection and configuration step. This is left to the user, as a set of overrideable tools and flags.

On the other hand, the simplest setup only requires setting one single variable.

About geany-plugin.mk

Default dependencies

geany-plugin.mk uses Libtool and pkg-config by default, and although it is possible to avoid using them, it requires non-trivial overrides.

Libtool is especially hard to avoid, because building a shared library dynamically loadable by an application can be vastly different depending on the OS, or even the target architecture.

Portability

The Makefile itself should be fairly portable around Make implementations, and has been tested with GNU and BSD Makes.

The default setup should also be fairly portable around Unices, but has yet to be tested on non-Linux platforms.

Usage as a developer

To use geany-plugin.mk, the only absolutely required thing is to set the PLUGIN Make variable to the name of the plugin to build. It will be the name of the plugin library file, with the library extension appended.

You may also want to override the following:

PLUGIN_SOURCES : the list of the plugin's source files (which defaults to $(PLUGIN).c for convenience); PLUGIN_PACKAGES : the list of pkg-config packages the plugin requires (but note that Geany's package is always included, and you don't need to list it); PLUGIN_CFLAGS : the additional C compiler flags for the plugin; PLUGIN_LDFLAGS : the additional linker flags for the plugin.

Please note that the plugin-specific flags should only contain the required flags, like constants definition, but no user flags. E.g., please restrain from adding warning flags or alike -- instead set CFLAGS or LDFLAGS in your environment or when calling Make.

Each plugin-specific targets (install-$(PLUGIN), uninstall-$(PLUGIN), clean-$(PLUGIN) and distclean-$(PLUGIN)) has a -local version that you can use to hook custom code to these operations if needed.

Although you can set all these on the Make command line, or by editing a copy of geany-plugin.mk, it is strongly recommended to define them in a Makefile from which you source geany-plugin.mk

Example Makefile

PLUGIN          := my-plugin
PLUGIN_SOURCES  := my-plugin-file1.c my-plugin-file2.c
PLUGIN_PACKAGES := gtk+-2.0

# this is required to support VPATH building.  If you don't care about
# this and don't feel like you understand it, you can remove it and not
# use it in the include below.
VPATH ?= .

# source geany-plugin.mk
include $(VPATH)/geany-plugin.mk

Usage as an end user

In addition to the developer-specific variables, a user calling a geany-plugin.mk-based Makefile can override several variables to fine-tune the behavior.

Installation destination can be overridden, as well as being prefixed. geany-plugin.mk honors the DESTDIR variable, which will be used as the root directory where to install files. Additionally, the plugindir variable that defines the target directory for installation can be overridden, and defaults to Geany's plugin directory (as reported by pkg-config).

Most tools and flags can be overridden, and will honor the values from the environment. Tools are:

CC : C compiler, defaults to cc; RM : removes files, defaults to rm -f; RMDIR : removes empty directories, defaults to rmdir; MKDIR_P : creates directories recursively, defaults to mkdir -p; INSTALL : installs files, defaults to install; LIBTOOL : builds libraries, defaults to libtool; PKG_CONFIG : manages package flags, defaults to pkg-config.

Although Libtool is supposed to be used, and then overriding the following should not be useful, the caller can also override some task-specific Libtool calls: LIBTOOL_CC, LIBTOOL_LD, LIBTOOL_CLEAN, LIBTOOL_INSTALL and LIBTOOL_UNINSTALL. Note however that as the default for those respects the various tools above, one should never have to override them unless one tries to avoid using libtool.

Used flags include CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS and LIBTOOLFLAGS.

There are also the special PACKAGES_CFLAGS and PACKAGES_LIBS that should contain flags required by all packages used by the plugin. These default to the result of $(PKG_CONFIG) --cflags and $(PKG_CONFIG) --libs respectively, on all $(PLUGIN_PACKAGES) packages and the "geany" package. Manually overriding those should be seldom necessary, unless pkg-config reports erroneous flags.

The special CC_DEPS_CFLAGS are flags passed to the compiler to generate Makefile dependencies in $(DEPSDIR)/[email protected]. The default value uses GCC syntax for it; but if your compiler doesn't support it you can set it either to a blank value (which will obviously disable automatic dependencies) or to whatever flags your compiler has for this purpose.

Finally, out-of-tree ("VPATH") builds are supported using the VPATH variable, on Make implementations that support it, and if the developer-specific Makefile does. This variable should point to the directory containing the sources.

Appendix

License

Copyright 2014 Colomban Wendling <[email protected]>

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.