Includes

[Serge Aleynikov]

Pupeno wrote:
> Where should header files needed for others to use my library go ?
> I have Erlang on /usr/lib/erlang/ so my project, let's suppose Serlvers, go 
> into:
> /usr/lib/erlang/serlvers-x.y.z/
> where x.y.z is the version (0.1.0 now, 0.2.0 soon). Is that right ? wrong ? 
> nobody knows ?

A more traditional location would be:
/usr/lib/erlang/lib/serlvers-x.y.z/

Though, you have other options, such as:

1. Assign some other common directory for custom applications, and use 
"-pa PATH" option of the compiler to include the paths to those apps.

2. Use embedded systems approach (see "Embedded Systems User's Guide") 
for building and distributing your application.  In this case you don't 
need to create "serlvers-x.y.z" folders for different releases, and just 
use "serlvers" in your development environment.  The 
systools:make_script/2, systools:make_tar/2 will take care of including 
paths with proper application versioning.  This makes it quite 
convenient to do an embedded distribution of your app together with the 
Erlang virtual machine on hosts that don't have Erlang installed.  This 
is a more advanced task, and I would suggest that you would experiment 
with only if you need to get a good understanding of the OTP release 
handling principles.

> Then include files would go on:
> /usr/lib/erlang/serlvers-x.y.z/include/
> right ?

/usr/lib/erlang/lib/serlvers-x.y.z/include/

> How should then the applications using Serlvers include those files ?
 > -include("/usr/lib/erlang/serlvers-0.1.0/include/dns.hrl"). I don't
 > think full paths are right here.
 > -include("serlvers-0.1.0/include/dns.hrl"). and adding -l 
/usr/lib/erlang/ at
 > build time ? Then in the next patchlevel serlvers-0.1.1, whatever was
 > using serlvers won't work.

Refer to section 4.2.4 of the Erlang Reference Manual.

-include("dns.hrl").

and then use the following to compile a source code file:

erlc -I /usr/lib/erlang/lib/serlvers-x.y.z/include ... your_file.erl

Alternatively, use:

-include_lib("serlvers/include/dns.hrl").

in this case you don't need to specify the full path 
"/usr/lib/erlang/lib/serlvers-x.y.z/include" at compile time, as the 
compiler should be able to locate the latest version of your serlvers 
application automatically.

> And this takes me to a more problematic point: How should header files of 
> project A include header files of project A and project B ?
> 
> Supouse that I have /usr/lib/erlang/serlvers-x.y.z/include/common.hrl, should 
> dns.hrl -include("common.hrl") ? -include("include/common.hrl") ? 

Frankly I don't think it's a good idea, as it makes code analysis more 
confusing, but others may have a different opinion on this coding style.

> Any help is really appreciated, I am lost here.

Hope this helps.

Serge