14.1 Customizing your Projects

This section describes some possible ways to customize your projects when working in a cross environment. For more details on the project capabilities, see Project Handling.

When using the project editor to modify the project’s properties, two areas are particularly relevant to cross environments: Cross environment part of the General page, and Toolchains part of the Languages page.

In the Toolchains section, you will typically either scan your system to display found toolchains, and select the one corresponding to your cross environment or use the Add button and manually select the desired cross environment.

If needed, you can also modify manually some of the tools defined in this toolchain in the Details part of the Languages page.

For example, assuming you have an Ada project, and using a powerpc VxWorks configuration. Hitting the scan button, you should see the toolchain powerpc-wrs-vxworks appearing in the Toolchains section. Selecting this toolchain will change the Details part, displaying the relevant tools (e.g. Gnatls to powerpc-wrs-vxworks-gnatls and Debugger to powerpc-wrs-vxworks-gdb …).

The list of toolchains and their default values that can be selected when using the Add button can be modified via a custom xml file. See Customizing and Extending GPS and in particular Toolchains customization for further information.

If you are using an alternative run time, e.g. a soft float run time, you need to add the option --RTS=soft-float to the Gnatls property, e.g: powerpc-wrs-vxworks-gnatls --RTS=soft-float, and add this same option to the Make switches in the switch editor. See Switches for more details on the switch editor.

To modify your project to support configurations such as multiple targets, or multiple hosts, you can create scenario variables, and modify the setting of the Toolchains parameters based on the value of these variables. See Scenarios and Configuration Variables for more information on these variables.

For example, you may want to create a variable called Target to handle the different kind of targets handled in your project:

Target

Native, Embedded

Target

Native, PowerPC, M68K

Similarly, you may define a Board variable listing the different boards used in your environment and change the Program host and Protocol settings accordingly.

In some cases, it is useful to provide a different body file for a given package (e.g. to handle target specific differences). A possible approach in this case is to use a configuration variable (e.g. called TARGET), and specify a different naming scheme for this body file (in the project properties, Naming tab), based on the value of TARGET.