How to handle semi-relative include paths with cppcheck - c++

Question

Our C++ project is organized in several modules (== subfolders) and headers are placed next to the .cpp files:
CMakeLists.txt
src
│
└───folder1
│ │
│ └───subfolder1
│ │ MyClass1.h
│ │ MyClass1.cpp
│ │ ...
│
└───folder2
│ │
│ └───subfolder2
│ │ MyClass2.h
│ │ MyClass2.cpp
│ │ ...
Include directives are always defined relative to the folder src and not relative to the code file e.g. in MyClass1.cpp:
#include "folder1/subfolder1/MyClass1.h" // even the own header is defined semi-relatively
#include "folder2/subfolder2/MyClass2.h"
MyClass1::MyClass1() {
// some code
}
I recently noticed that cppcheck (version 1.89) has problems with this and does not correctly
resolve macros defined in a header file -> False complaints about correct code
find problems with class member initialization (e.g. MyClass::MyClass() : _foo(_foo) {}) -> No complaints about incorrect code
When providing -I src to the cppcheck CLI, macros are correctly identified and actual issues like above are found, but analysis time skyrockets from 2 to 20 minutes.
I suspect, that by providing the whole source code again via -I, the files are all re-parsed as header files. Unfortunately, I don't have a specific include/ sub folder which I can use here. What is advised here? I am already using multiple jobs: -j 4.

Answer 1

After some further investigation, this might actually not be a valid question:
I manually took all header files and copied them to a separate folder: find . -type f \( -iname \*.h -o -iname \*.inl -o -iname \*.hpp \) -exec cp --parents \{\} ./../__cppcheckWorkaroundInclude \; which I then provided via -I to cppcheck
The check still took 20 minutes, so my assumption that cppcheck wrongfully scans too much is invalid - it actually takes this long because it is a lot of code.
So providing -I __cppcheckWorkaroundInclude or -I src to cppcheck did not make a difference - at least I did not observe one. Meaning, that -I works as expected
To solve the performance issues (I run the job inside a CI and 20 minutes is a lot of time which I would rather spend on executing automated tests), I did the following:
Reduce the checked configurations --max-configs=5
Used incremental checking via --cppcheck-build-dir=CppcheckBuildDir
To integrate this in our Gitlab CI, I had to cache this directory:
cache:
paths:
- CppcheckBuildDir
and before the cppcheck call, the directory has to be created (but with the -p flag because the dir might already be there, taken from the cache!):
mkdir -p CppcheckBuildDir