Qt qmake - how to stop it adding rules to delete the target

Question

I am trying to add a unit test to a group of other tests. All the tests are in their own subdirectories, each with it's own .pro file and the .cpp file which contains the tests themselves. Running qmake in one of the subdirectories creates a Makefile, and then running make runs the compiler to make the TARGET. The tests are actually run by the 'check' target - ie with 'make check'.

The test I'm trying to add is different, but it is trying to pretend to behave the same way.

It is different because it is a perl script and so doesn't need to be compiled. It does, however, need to be run - so 'make check' needs to work.

I had a .pro file working for the most part - 'qmake', 'make', 'make check', and 'make clean' would work, but 'make distclean' removed my script (since it assumes it can be regenerated by compiling something).

So, the question is, how do I stop it from removing my script?

Perhaps there's some other approach I should be taking. I had tried the 'subdirs' TEMPLATE, but that does more than just remove the line in Makefile that deletes the TARGET.

Ideas?

Using Ubuntu Linux with Qt 4.6.0.

Answer 1

I would look into the custom target capabilities for your script. Maybe something like this:

check.commands = <scriptname>
check.depends = <any dependencies>
QMAKE_EXTRA_TARGETS += check

Doing things this way will run the check command when the dependencies change, but as long as you don't specify check.target then it shouldn't remove anything. (If your script does produce output, then perhaps that should be in check.target.) Also, since it is specified as an "extra" command, qmake shouldn't create commands to delete your script in a distclean.

This is assuming that your script is in its own subdirectory (which you state), and is the only "check" command that needs run in that subdirectory (kind of implied by the question, but not directly stated).