Re: [cmake-developers] Creating a Keil uVision generator

[Brad King]

On 01/02/2017 06:27 PM, Paul Wilkinson wrote:
> As with the Visual Studio generators, a generator for uVision projects would
> ideally be a multi-configuration generator.

Yes, the layouts sounds similar.  A uVision project generator implementation
could be modeled after the VS 2015 generator.  It would be nice to use the
cmXMLWriter for the actual writing of the files if they are XML syntax
(the VS generator would ideally do this too but pre-dated the helper).

> I expect there are many concepts in CMake that wouldn't map to a uVision 
> option,
> and vice-versa. For example the "Packs" system used by uVision might not mesh
> well with what CMake understands as a library.

This may be a problem.  Unless CMake's buildsystem model:

 https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.7/manual/cmake-buildsystem.7.html

can be mapped cleanly to uVision project files then it may not be a good fit.

> For my limited requirements -- a
> single project workspace, where the project consists of exactly one executable
> and no libraries other than some third-party libraries passed to linker -- I
> expect we could make do with a skeleton/template .uvprojx and the CMake
> generator would fill in the gaps for the source files.

Unfortunately that case sounds so limited that a special case to support it
would not be appropriate for inclusion in CMake.  Way back in the VS 6 days
when CMake started we used template project files for generation, and they
were very painful to maintain and extend.

Thanks,
-Brad

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[cmake-developers] Creating a Keil uVision generator

[Paul Wilkinson]

Hi all,

I am involved in a software project targeting a handful of ARM Cortex-M
microcontrollers. We develop the software using the Keil uVision v5 IDE [1]. We
are considering whether CMake could help us with some of the limitations we
encounter using uVision alone.

Does anyone have experience or insight in to creating a CMake generator for an
embedded systems IDE like uVision?

Read on for some technical details.

A uVision project's structure appears _roughly_ similar to a Microsoft Visual
Studio 12 project. uVision has a Multi-Project Workspace (.uvmpw) rather than a
VS solution (.sln), and a uVision Project (.uvprojx) instead of a VS project
(.vcxproj).

One notable difference in the XML schemas: in uVision, the source file elements
are a child of the target elements (a uVision "target" is comparable to a VS
"configuration"), in contrast to VS's approach where a configuration-specific
option is a child of the source file element and has a "Condition" attribute.

As with the Visual Studio generators, a generator for uVision projects would
ideally be a multi-configuration generator.

I expect there are many concepts in CMake that wouldn't map to a uVision option,
and vice-versa. For example the "Packs" system used by uVision might not mesh
well with what CMake understands as a library. For my limited requirements -- a
single project workspace, where the project consists of exactly one executable
and no libraries other than some third-party libraries passed to linker -- I
expect we could make do with a skeleton/template .uvprojx and the CMake
generator would fill in the gaps for the source files.

Some of the benefits I would imagine we would get from such a generator:

- more human-friendly and diff-friendly project files (CMakeLists.txt instead
  of .uvprojx)

- avoiding a combinatorial explosion of configurations by using the CMake
  language and its cache variables.

[1] http://www2.keil.com/mdk5/uvision/

Thanks,
Paul Wilkinson
http://www.cmedrobotics.com/


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