Re: Antwort: Re: Feature request: meta files & wildcards (once again)

[Alex Hornby]

On Mon, 2002-05-06 at 06:30, Tom Tromey wrote:
> Nowadays we could probably implement pattern rules purely in automake.
> Back in the old days we didn't have the machinery to allow this.
> Automake itself was too primitive.  But now it would be more possible,
> if someone were motivated.  Maybe this would help with the
> longstanding CORBA problems?
> 
> Tom

Hi Tom,

Certainly would. The problem I had with suffix rules, was that one
invocation of the idl compiler on one .idl file expands into many .h and
.cpp files, therefore I needed a suffix rule for each product. So far so
good, but when I do a parallel build the rules then race each other and
overwrite each others products (as the compiler always writes all
files), which can be bad if the compiler is reading one of those files
at the time..

My solution is to wrap a locking script around the suffix rules so that
any one .idl file only has the idl compiler run on it once.

I guess if automake was to do the pattern->suffix rule conversion itself
it would ship with such a script (in a similar way to the packaging of
depcomp etc), and use it to protect the generated rules against parallel
builds.

Alex.