Emacs and cscope with multiple directories

Question

How do I set up cscope in Emacs when my source code lives in multiple directories?

Say I have several paths for my C++ project:

1. /path/to/my/code (and subdirectories)
2. /path/to/other/code (and subdirectories)
3. /path/to/static/linking/include/files (and subdirectories)
4. /path/to/static/linking/lib/files' (and subdirectories)

I would like to use xcscope to navigate/look up symbols in my code and the library that I am linking to.

The instructions for xcscope.el say that I should first run C-c s (Cscope->Create list and index) at /path/to/my/code, but I am then confused about how I to have the other paths indexed by cscope.

The documentation says I should go to the other directories and run cscope -b, but what I am supposed to do after that?

I looked at the cscope.files file that C-c s built. I think I am supposed to add my other paths to this file, but this file includes a list of source code files (not directories).

Do I have to manually edit cscope.files to add every single file that I want to index that is outside of my project's root directory?

Answer 1

The documentation is confusing.

I got one sol'n from http://cscope.sourceforge.net/large_projects.html. Still confusing.

cscope.files is aptly named. It is NOT directories. It is files, only files. Which is as daunting as it sounds. What if you have hundreds of files. Then you have to write hundreds of lines, one per file, into cscope.files. No joke.

Automate it with some scripting. E.g., on linux, use bash scripts and redirection (>,>>,|) operators to select and filter files from any and all directories into that cscope.files. What about the directory where cscope.files resides? IF you don't include those files, it'll only find them when you open your project (in emacs, but probably applicable to any IDE) in that source directory. So, include them, too, for easy opening of your project from anywhere. The option "recursive/-R" seems obvious to send to cscope-indexer. Nope, not with many root directories. Does nothing (probably could do something with scripts or elisp or who knows). Just feed those files, absolute path, into cscope.files. And you might have to make sure you have only one cscope.files per project. Don't split them up relative to each diretory. Or maybe you can, something to look into.

Remember, include the /path/to/each/file/ before the file if you want cscope.files to point to it from anywhere. cscope isn't "smart", it's dumb, it just takes directions for where to look and it won't know where to look for "filename", without knowing where it is. You're just asking it to call locate filename, which it can't do anyway, when you give it a lonely filename without a dir path outside of the directory that a particular cscope.files resides.

I hope there's a way to use xcscope inside emacs, just adding directories which it will catalog and index, as the xcscope docs and emacs menu suggest. But I didn't succeed in making it work that way.

Answer 2

Wouldn't a soft link (ln -s) work? Worked for me.