forceinclude option not working properly

[edo9300]

What seems to be the problem?
I'm using premake with a project that has a structure like this

test
├── premake5.lua
└── subproject
    ├── forced-header.h
    ├── premake5.lua
    └── src
        └── source.cpp

this is the content of the topmost premake5.lua file

workspace "test"
location "build"
language "C++"
objdir "obj"
configurations { "Debug", "Release" }

include "subproject"

this is the content of the second premake5.lua

project "subproject"
	kind "StaticLib"
	files { "src/*.cpp" }	
	forceincludes { "forced-header.h" }

My intention is to have forced-header.h be included in all the files in the src folder, and as the docs say Paths should be specified relative to the currently running script file.
Instead, the generated solutions don't work as expected, with the gmake2 and msvc targets also differing in their behaviour:

• In the msvc target, the forceinclude is checked from the source file's current path, and to have it be found by the compiler, it has to be passed as forceincludes { "../forced-header.h" } to premake
• In the gmake2 target, the search path is the path the generated makefile is in, so in this case the build directory, and to have it found it has to be passed as forceincludes { "../subproject/forced-header.h" } to premake

What did you expect to happen?
The function behaves as described and the targets properly find the header, or at least "break" in a consistent way

How can we reproduce this?

• Visual Studio 2022 (vs2022)
• Visual Studio 2019 (vs2019)
• Visual Studio 2017 (vs2017)
• Visual Studio 2015 (vs2015)
• Visual Studio 2012 (vs2012)
• Visual Studio 2010 (vs2010)
• Visual Studio 2008 (vs2008)
• Visual Studio 2005 (vs2005)
• GNU Makefile (gmake)
• GNU Makefile 2 (gmake2)
• XCode (xcode)
• Codelite
• Other (Please list below)

What version of Premake are you using?
premake5 (Premake Build Script Generator) 5.0.0-beta2

[richard-sim]

I think the issue is that you're not adding test/subproject/ to the include search path, i.e.:

project "subproject"
	kind "StaticLib"
	files { "src/*.cpp" }	
	forceincludes { "forced-header.h" }
        includedirs { "." }

/FI (MSVC) and --include (gcc, clang) basically just prepend the source files with #include "forced-header.h", and have no additional magic to find that file beyond how it finds any other include file (well, other than GCC will first search the preprocessors working directory for forced includes... for reasons. Hence the difference you see between MSVC and gmake2).

[edo9300]

Yeah, that seemed to be it, I guess the docs need to be updated in case to specify that the folder must be aging the include directories

[nickclark2016]

A bit late to the party, but I think in terms of functionality, this is what we want. We could definitely update the docs to specifically call out that the forced include must be on the defined include directories paths.