4.3. Project structure

Project View lists the project in standard automake heirarchy organized into groups of targets. Groups correspond to directories in your project and targets correspond to normal automake targets (not to be confused with make targets). Project View actually has two parts; one part (lower one) shows complete project heirarchy and the other part (upper one) lists important targets directly. Important targets constitute executable and library targets -- making them very accessible in from the view. This is particularly useful in big projects where the heirarchy could be deep and hard to navigate from the tree alone. Targets are, in turn, composed of source files.

• Groups are used to logically organize targets. A project can contain any number of groups. Each group can have sub-groups as well as targets. In automake projects, groups are just sub-directories in the project. The top level group is called root and is always "/".

• Targets are the build targets in project, such as programs (executable binaries), scripts, libraries, miscellaneous data etc. Not all target types are built from sources, but exist just to organize the sources and therefore may not exist physically (e.g. Miscellaneous data target). Targets exist under groups. See "Adding targets" for full list of available target types.

• Source files are the files used to build the targets or just to be part of it. They exist only under targets. Many target types expect certain type of source files (e.g. programs and libraries target types), but some can accept any file (e.g. Miscellaneous data target).

Each of the project groups and targets is configurable in standard automake way. You can set complier and linker flags directly for each target, or set configure variables. Groups allow setting installation destinations for its targets.

Just like file manager, project manager view also has convenience actions (accessible from context menu) for the source files and targets.

Many command-line tools are available to maintain and manage a project, and each tool has its own specific rules and capabilities. Anjuta tries to automate most of the common operations using plugins. However, you might occationally still need to do them manually.

It is possible to make use of other tools or hand edit the project files simulaneously. It doesn't matter if the project is loaded in Anjuta or not. Anjuta would update itself with any external changes made to project.