Is it possible to make Microsoft build.exe include sources from remote directories?

Question

Adding source files more than one directory away (e.g. ../../source.cpp or ../../../somewhere_else/source.cpp, vs. just source.cpp or ../source.cpp) to the SOURCES= declaration in a WDK/DDK build yields the following error:

Ignoring invalid directory prefix in SOURCES= entry

Is it possible to include remote source files in a build?

Answer 1

It is not possible to do this directly. build is explicitly designed only to deal with source code in the same or parent directory of the sources file. It cannot use source files from arbitrary locations. In particular, its dependency-tracking system seems unable to parse and track remote files, and therefore it explicitly checks and enforces that all files be local.

There are two common solutions:

1. Build remote code as a separate lib (either via another subproject/directory in the same build project, or using an independent build step).

2. Place a local stub for each remote source file which does #include "../../remote_source.cpp, and add this local stub to the SOURCES= list, instead. This will work, but build/nmake will not track dependencies in the remote_source.cpp. If remote_source.cpp changes, you will have to either touch the local proxy source, or otherwise force a rebuild (delete the local proxy obj, run build with -cZ, or otherwise).

Answer 2

An alternate way is to use source.inc to include these files.

Answer 3

Hate to resurrect a super old topic, but I just ran into this as well.

An alternate alternate way is to create another sources file inside that solely builds object files of the remote source, so basically a file named somewhere_else\sources, and give it the same intermediate directory.

Then add a 'dirs' file to your original directory and specify that remote folder inside. Then link directly to the object file by adding something like this to the original sources file:

$(TARGETLIBS) = $(PROJECT_OBJ_ROOT)\$(O)\source.obj

This way, you don't have to compile as a lib, but build treats it like one and links without any dependency checking or care of location.

Naturally you might run into some problems if you give them the same intermediate directory and the same original source file name (source.cpp)