A tool to remove unused header files?
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Qt Creator does not have such a tool integrated.
There is the "iwyu clang extension":https://code.google.com/p/include-what-you-use/ that is supposed to do it, but so far I had little success with it as its output needs some changing to work well with Qt headers. It only reports headers that it recommends to be added/removed, so you will need to do the editing.
PS: You can use the tasklist plugin of Qt Creator with a bit of scripting to make that editing a bit less painful.
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Ok, I have just had a quick look (https://code.google.com/p/include-what-you-use/wiki/InstructionsForUsers) and this is still a beta tool and requires quite a few things to get it off the ground (LLVM+Clang). So, it seems to me that I might be wasting more time than anything trying to use it.
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I did not find it too hard to test (I tend to have a recent build of clang around;-), but the results were not really useful to me: It suggested to remove all the "QSomeThing" headers and then wanted to have a lot of some/path/qsomething.h" headers added. That caused a lot of noise which made it really hard to find the real changes.
A bit of scripting should help here. Maybe the tool could get fixed to not complain about headers that only include others. I should look into that at some point... if I find the time for some recreational hacking that is:-)
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Actually, in the general case, I think a tool like this should catch such "forward" headers. They are often used as general "always include this header" kind of things in projects, and often contain a lot of stuff you don't really need. However, in Qt's case, most of them are actually useful. It is nice to be able to write
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#include <QString>
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instead of
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#include "QtCore/qstring.h"
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or something like that. However, I think that the tool should suggest to replace
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#include <QtCore>
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with the include for QString only, if that is all you use. -
I did not find it too hard to test (I tend to have a recent build of clang around;-), but the results were not really useful to me: It suggested to remove all the "QSomeThing" headers and then wanted to have a lot of some/path/qsomething.h" headers added. That caused a lot of noise which made it really hard to find the real changes.
A bit of scripting should help here. Maybe the tool could get fixed to not complain about headers that only include others. I should look into that at some point... if I find the time for some recreational hacking that is:-)
@tobias-hunger excuse me , i 'm trying to use the "include-what-you-use" with a qt project, but i failed to do that. And i didn't find any tutorial, coud u tell me how to config it please? Thank u.