Right now interface definitions are preprocessed with the GCC preprocessor. This has the consequence that they can't include lines that are interpreted by the GCC preprocessor as directives or C comment start or end anchors, like # comments and path/wildcards/*.
m4 is made exactly for this use case, templating, so it would be much more suitable.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| On hold | erkin | T3644 Replace GCC with a simpler preprocessor for including nested XML snippets in XML documents | |||
| Resolved | erkin | T2750 Use m4 as a template processor |
There is now some python XML code to parse the XML. m4 is not a nice tool. If better pre-processing is required, which I would not argue for, please explain the issue you are trying to solve.
If anything this code could/should be extracted in an internal library and then a tool created to replace what we have so the behaviour is consistent in both cases.
I wasn't trying to solve any specific issue. I was working on some other project, trying to use GCC as a preprocessor, the same way as it's used here, and ran into those obstacles I listed in the original description, which are present here too. I was made aware m4 is much more suitable to template processing than GCC as it was actually designed and made for it.
As for using any self-made code to do this, I have no problem with that as long as it's well known this is what is now used, is documented, and then an effort made to port all preprocessing to it. I see no sense using two or three different preprocessors.
Yes the GCC preprocessors is limited (but works for the current use case) and m4 is indeed more powerful but not a user-friendly tool IMHO.