Who to force qmake to use absolute paths in generated Makefiles

[fightling]

I have a QT project with some sub projects like this:

main/
  main.pro
  sub1/
    include/
    src/
      s1.cpp
    sub1.pro
  sub2/
    sub2.pro

main/
  main.pro
  sub1/
    include/
    src/
      s1.cpp
    sub1.pro
  sub2/
    sub2.pro

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I generate the makefiles with qmake -r from the top. qmake is then generating Makefiles for main.pro, sub1.pro and sub2.pro. Because qmake uses relative paths the paths within the Makefiles of sub1 and sub2 are relatively to the pro files. This causes clang to print relative paths when referring to source code files within error messages:

src/s1.cpp:22:13: error: expected '('

src/s1.cpp:22:13: error: expected '('

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And seen from the project directory src/s1.cpp doesn't exist. At least the path should be sub1/src/s1.cpp.
Another solution would be to force qmake to generate absolute paths in the Makefile but I can't find a way to do that.
Any idea?

[fightling]

no one with an idea?

[jefftee]

Not sure I fully understand your problem, or which project / makefile is being processed when you get this error. If you're building the sub1.pro subproject, src/s1.cpp is a correct reference, no?

How about providing the contents of the profiles and the actual build output to start?

[fightling]

qmake generates a Makefile that includes some directory changes. When it's about to compile a sub project it switches to that directory and then runs all the clang/cc commands to compile. But because this is not happening in the top project's directory, the output relates to the sub projects directory. My IDE/Editor who wants to interpret the error messages cannot find the source file because it overlooks the directory changes. So my solution would be to force qmake to use absolute path within the makefiles it generates. I thought this would be a very common problem :/

[zmurf]

Im not sure if this is what you are asking for. But if you want qmake to only create absolute path you should put following line into your .pro file

QMAKE_PROJECT_DEPTH = 0 # undocumented qmake flag to force absolute paths in make files

QMAKE_PROJECT_DEPTH = 0 # undocumented qmake flag to force absolute paths in make files

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It basically tells qmake that the accepted depth for a relative path is zero. So there will never be any relative paths.

You can find information about this and other undocumented features on QTs wiki page.
https://wiki.qt.io/Undocumented_QMake