windres handles #include suffixes?

[nick clifton]

Hi Alon,

> But this is a strange behavior, no?

It is rather.  But it is definitely explicitly coded this way.  See the 
start of the binutils/rclex.c file where it describes the 
'suppress_cpp_data' variable in a comment which reads:

/* Whether we are supressing lines from cpp (including windows.h or
    headers from your C sources may bring in externs and typedefs).
    When active, we return IGNORED_TOKEN, which lets us ignore these
    outside of resource constructs.  Thus, it isn't required to protect
    all the non-preprocessor lines in your header files with #ifdef
    RC_INVOKED.  It also means your RC file can't include other RC
    files if they're named "*.h".  Sorry.  Name them *.rch or whatever.  */

The strange thing is that nowhere in the code or documentation does it 
explain why this behaviour is necessary.  I suspect that the designers 
found that it was too complicated to add support for scanning C header 
files when all they wanted to do was process windows rc file syntax. 
Hence their decision to silently ignore #includ'ed files with a .h suffix.


> BTW: is this the same with MSVC? I almost sure MSVC handles all data.

If you can show that MSVC does do this then we will have to fix windres. 
  On the other hand if MSVC behaves in the same way as windres, then you 
will need to modify your build environment instead.

Assuming that you can show that MSVC includes .h files, please could you 
open a bug report for this problem here:

   http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/

I have a possible patch for the bug, which allows #include'd .h files to 
be processed provided that their pathname does not start with a forward 
slash.  This assumes that files with a relative pathname are user 
generated resource files and do not include C syntax, whereas files with 
an absolute path are system generated and do include C syntax.  Hmm, 
this may not always be true however.  I may need to add a command line 
switch to restore the old behaviour of ignoring all .h files.


> When I am force to have .rc suffix, it is harder to control the
> implicit rules...

You could always use a .rch suffix.

Cheers
   Nick