File not found error on Visual Studio Code when clicking on problems window (using make, gcc and gcc problemMatcher)

Question

I work on a project which uses "make and gcc" to compile all its modules. These modules are on their own folders and have their own Makefiles. A global Makefile calls them in order to compile the binary.

So now I am trying to use Visual Studio Code as my IDE. I have set up the compilation environment and it works well.

The only problem is whenever there is some warning/compilation, clicking on them doesn’t open the proper file. My working directory will be similar to the below shown simplified code.

D:\SO
|-- common
|   |-- main.c
|   `-- Makefile
`-- Makefile

From the tasks I will be calling the outside Makefile, which will call the Makefile inside common. And in the main.c, I have deliberately deleted stdio.h header file inclusion, which should show an implicit declaration error. But when I click warnings on problem window, VS code throws an error showing the file is not found. VS Code tries to open "D:\SO\main.c", but the file is actually inside "D:\SO\common\main.c"

Outer Makefile

all:
    (cd common &&  make )

Inner Makefile (inside common directory)

all:
    gcc main.c

main.c

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    printf("Hello World");
    return 0;
}

tasks.json

{
    // See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733558
    // for the documentation about the tasks.json format
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "taskName": "make",
            "command": "make",
            "type": "shell",
            "problemMatcher": [
                "$gcc"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

I have tried to tweak the problemMatcher by giving different combinations for fileLocation parameter. But they don’t yield a proper result. So I haven't included it here.

I am using Visual Studio Code 1.14.2 on Windows 10 1607 x64 with a mingw-gcc.

Answer 1

This isn't an answer to your question, but I expect it would be a prerequisite to any solution that Microsoft or others could provide.

You have a bug in your nested Makefiles. You should never do this pattern in a Makefile:

cd somewhere; make target

The cd is unnecessary (see below), but the use of make directly is a problem. Such a pattern messes up the ability for one invocation of make to pass information to sub-makes. In particular, it messes up parallel make. It also invokes make with the current shell path, which might not be the make that was originally used. You should always use this pattern instead:

$(MAKE) -C somewhere target

The -C dir parameter tells make where to set its current working directory. And using $(MAKE) allows flags and parameters to be passed down.

Since this is the recommended nested-Makefile pattern, I would think that any parsing that vscode would do to determine the appropriate fileLocation would likely require it.