Remove --no-print-directory from recursive make calls

[btgould]

I am using premake to generate gnu makefiles for my project. By default, premake specifies --no-print-directory at the location of each recursive make call.

e.g. The makefile generated in the root directory has several entries (one for each project in my workspace) each of the form:

Project:
ifneq (,$(Project_config))
	@echo "==== Building Project ($(Project_config)) ===="
	@${MAKE} --no-print-directory -C path/to/project/dir -f Makefile config=$(Project_config)
endif

And each corresponding subdirectory has a makefile that handles building that specific project.

I would like to remove the --no-print-directory option from the recursive make calls. Specifically, this is so that the makefile-tools extension for vscode can properly parse my makefiles and generate intellisense information, which it needs printed information each time make changes directories to do.

Is there an option that I could specify somewhere to remove the --no-print-directory from these calls?

Environment: Ubuntu 20.04 using premake5 version 5.0.0-alpha15

[starkos]

There is not an official way to do that currently, and not a particularly clean way to override the logic either. You could try to override premake.make.projectrules() (or premake.gmake2.projectrules depending on which action you're using), and just modify the logic to suit. Something like (untested):

premake.override(premake.make, 'projectiles', function(base, wks)
    for prj in p.workspace.eachproject(wks) do
        local deps = project.getdependencies(prj)
        deps = table.extract(deps, "name")
        _p('%s:%s', p.esc(prj.name), make.list(deps))

        local cfgvar = make.tovar(prj.name)
        _p('ifneq (,$(%s_config))', cfgvar)

        _p(1,'@echo "==== Building %s ($(%s_config)) ===="', prj.name, cfgvar)

        local prjpath = p.filename(prj, make.getmakefilename(prj, true))
        local prjdir = path.getdirectory(path.getrelative(wks.location, prjpath))
        local prjname = path.getname(prjpath)

        -- removed `--no-print-directory` here --
        _x(1,'@${MAKE} -C %s -f %s config=$(%s_config)', prjdir, prjname, cfgvar)

        _p('endif')
        _p('')
    end
end)

This won't be future-proof though; it would be better to submit a PR to add an option to control it.

[btgould]

Thank you! With some minor modifications, this worked!

Unfortunately, I am not too familiar with premake's inner workings, so I am not sure what would even need to be changed in a PR to fix this issue.

If anyone else is coming here with the same question, the only required changes were to add some local declarations:

local p = premake
local gmake2 = p.modules.gmake2
...
premake.override(gmake2, 'projectrules', function(base, wks)
    local project = p.project
    ...
end

The project local must be declared inside the override scope so that it does not interfere with premake's default project keyword. I also changed all instances of make to gmake2, simply because that is the action I am using.