Re: Copying ressource files with gprbuild

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Felix Krause <flyx@isobeef.org> writes:

> I develop an application which depends on some ressource files. Let's
> say these ressource files are located in my source folder "src", next
> to the Ada sources, and let "ressource.txt" be one of these ressource
> files. I compile my application with GPRBuild and a standard folder
> setup. Currently, my code loads the ressource with the path
> "../src/ressource.txt", which works when I compile the code, navigate
> to the "bin" directory, and execute the binary there. It also works
> from inside GPS.
>
> Now I want to do some debugging. Therefore, I switch to build mode
> "debug" in GPS, which causes the executable to be executed in
> "bin/debug". From there, it obviously cannot locate ressource.txt. So
> I need some possibility to copy the ressource file to the folder the
> executable gets written to.

Presumably actually "bin/src"?

> After reading through the GPRBuild manual, it seems that there is no
> standard way of doing this with a project file. I thought about
> defining a custom language "txt" in the project file, and setting up
> appropriate drivers in the Compiler, Binder and Linker packages so
> that it will just be piped through the build process and lands in the
> executable output directory. But I couldn't figure out how I can get
> gprbuild to do this, and it also smells like a rather ugly hack.
>
> Now I know I can probably write some Makefile that will take care of
> copying the ressource files. But I'd like to know how others handle
> this problem, and if there is a way to handle ressource files with the
> project file.

If you are on a Unix-like system you might try a symbolic link;

  $ ln -s src bin/src

But it might be better to use for example an environment variable to
define the (absolute) location where the resource files are found.