Occasional Contributor
Super Contributor1) Assuming you are talking about Pro, you can duplicate the .qsys and the related .ip files (or use the archive system option to duplicate the system) and then select a different .qpf for it from the File menu in PD (Select Quartus project). The direct connection between system design and Quartus project in Pro provides benefits such as automatic regeneration of the system as needed and incremental regeneration so the entire system doesn't need to be regenerated every time a change is made.
2) Not entirely clear what you're looking for here. Why would you add components in a PD system directly to the Quartus project when they are already connected together in a PD system? Again, if you just change the selected Quartus project file for a copy of the system, everything becomes part of the selected Quartus project.
Occasional Contributor
@sstrell wrote:1) Assuming you are talking about Pro, you can duplicate the .qsys and the related .ip files (or use the archive system option to duplicate the system) and then select a different .qpf for it from the File menu in PD (Select Quartus project). The direct connection between system design and Quartus project in Pro provides benefits such as automatic regeneration of the system as needed and incremental regeneration so the entire system doesn't need to be regenerated every time a change is made.
Yes, we are using pro, but somewhat surprised that the tools would work very differently between the three versions. Yes, I see how this might allow the Quartus build to do some dependency checking and only regenerate/rebuild what has changed. I am more concerned about tracking changes than in improving build speed, but yes build speed does effect my productivity.
@sstrell wrote:2) Not entirely clear what you're looking for here. Why would you add components in a PD system directly to the Quartus project when they are already connected together in a PD system? Again, if you just change the selected Quartus project file for a copy of the system, everything becomes part of the selected Quartus project.
As mentioned we are generating the Quartus project using scripts. I think other sites do this also so that changes can be tracked in source code control. The problem with using a GUI is that it always changes the order in qsf file which causes problems with source code control - creating order related changes that are not functional changes.
At this point I see no path forward other than to use the GUI to maintain the list of IP files, copying changes in the generated project back to the scripts we use to generate the project. In many ways this is similar to how we track changes in the Quartus project options setting them in the GUI and copying them back to the scripts we use to generate the project that are tracked in source code control.
The problem with maintaining a huge list of QSYS IP files for the project is that it introduces significant work for us we didn't have to do in the past. In the past the top level QIP file took care of this.
