Handy tips for aiding development

Disabling documentation builds

If you are find you are repeatedly changing the API headers (in include/) during development, then you may become annoyed that the docs/ subdirectory will rebuild the doxygen documentation every time you run “make” since this takes a while. You can disable this temporarily (if you’re using GNU make), by creating a file “docs/GNUmakefile” containing these two lines:

%:
    @echo "Skipping 'make $@' in docs"

Note that the whitespace at the start of the second line needs to be a single “tab” character!

Don’t forget to remove (or rename) this and check the documentation builds before committing or generating a patch though!

Integration syntax checking with your editor

If you are using an editor or other tool capable of running syntax checks as you work there you can use the make target ‘check-syntax’. For ‘emacs’ users this works well with ‘flymake’. Usage from a shell:

make check-syntax check_sources=api/omdatabase.cc