emacs Semantic/senator : autocomplete for external lib's

Question

It seems this forum is more alive than mailing list : http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=cedet-semantic. I would like repost my quest from a week ago from there:

First hi to all who contribute to this great package as CEDET :D .

Without much hussle I am able to get working most of the CEDET futures, but when it comes to senator / semantic things get more tought :\ .

Parsing local files are fine. I don't use EDE not to get things more complicated. I use the 1.0.6 git trunk version, for compability with ECB.

1. First is the rumble about the emacs core / cedet git-trunk hussle. How do I check that current installation is running the latter ? ( I have done some .emacs modificaitons see below) .

2. I generally cannot get the proper autocomplete working for external libs - in this case the OGRE3D project, which all are in the /usr/include/OGRE. I suppose I have added to 'search path' include properly, semantic-describe-c-env. sees them added properly.

2.a What are the basic commands to the semantic parser ? , that is I need to force it to parse the desired includes.

Once I saw semantic parsing the OGRE files in the 'idle time'. Still the autocomplete does not work ( OGRE:RAY is not recongized as a type). senator-completition-menu-pop gives some non-matching 'c**p'

2.b I know there are customize-group options for semantic, tough their description say little to me.

From the other post:

"Yes, there is a setup cost. You can use semanticdb.sh to pre-parse your code, but if you never open every file, you might end up with Emacs having such a huge data structure it gets larger that your machine can handle. If your project is small, this shouldn't be a problem."

Well this might be, if that would parse OGRE.

here's my .emacs:

.emacs at pastebin.com

Answer 1

Here's what I got on the mailing list, hope that it would help someone , thaks to Eric Ludlam :D :

======================

1. First is the rumble about the emacs core / cedet git-trunk hussle. How do I check that current installation is running the latter ? ( I have done some .emacs modificaitons see below) . 

After emacs start, use:

M-x cedet-version RET

and look for the 1.1 version from CEDET/bzr.

I just tried this and noticed not everything has the right version number. Interesting. I'll have to look into that.

Anyway, the next thing to try is:

M-x locate-library RET cedet RET

and make sure it points where you think it should.

2. I generally cannot get the proper autocomplete working for external libs - in this case the OGRE3D project, which all are in the /usr/include/OGRE. I suppose I have added to 'search path' include properly, semantic-describe-c-env. sees them added properly. 

If you enable global-semantic-decoration-mode you can right-click on header files, and it will give you some options, such as showing where it things the header is, and showing if it has been parsed yet or not.

2.a What are the basic commands to the semantic parser ? , that is I need to force it to parse the desired includes. 

You can use the include menu to force a header to be parsed, or visit said include. If it can't find it, you can add OGRE to your path from there too.

If you vist your header, you can use the senator menu to force a file to reparse, or use:

C-u M-x bovinate RET

to do it.

Once I saw semantic parsing the OGRE files in the 'idle time'. Still the autocomplete does not work ( OGRE:RAY is not recongized as a type). senator-completition-menu-pop gives some non-matching 'c**p' 

Autocomplete can fail for many reasons. The best way to find out why is:

M-x semantic-analyze-debug-assist RET

at a place you want to do completion. It will tell you about your header files, symbols, and the like. It could be your preprocessor symbols need some setup.

For large complex library headers, sometimes it is just a matter of having the right pre-processor symbols setup in Semantic so that the right bits of the headers get parsed for symbols. You'd have to visit a header where a symbol you want to complete is, and see if it was parsed. Using:

M-x boviante RET

will dump the symbol table.

2.b I know there are customize-group options for semantic, tough their description say little to me.

    From the other post: 

"Yes, there is a setup cost. You can use semanticdb.sh to pre-parse your code, but if you never open *every* file, you might end up with Emacs having such a huge data structure it gets larger that your machine can handle. If your project is small, this shouldn't be a problem." Well this might be, if that would parse OGRE. 

I doubt parsing the includes is the problem here. I think there is just something new in the ogre headers we'll have to deal with.

Eric

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