Re: Fwd: Suggestion about derived files and commands

[Doug Warner x81804]

Rajesh Vaidheeswarran wrote:

> In a previous message, Wayne Scott wrote:
>
> > Has anyone written a patch for cons to fetch files from RCS or SCCS if
> > needed like Gmake can do?
>
> I'd rather not see cons have knowledge of version control
> systems. What I'd rather see is that we provide a general way to Install
> files
> and build them (which I think we do for the most part..).

I wrote a little Extensions module that tried to make CONS aware of our
SCCS repository.  Unfortunately, it didn't work very well, because CONS
determined that I had modified my working copies outside of CONS and
decided to rebuild them from the pristine SCCS repository.  I made the
source files depend on the SCCS history file, which obviously doesn't work
when it comes to version control.  CONS may not need to be aware of
particular version control systems, but it may need to be aware that
version control differs from compiling sources to objects.

This is one of the problems that stopped us from moving to CONS from Sun
make.  Another problem relates to changing the current directory when
processing Conscript files.  Without thinking about it too much, I assumed
that enabling Conscript_chdir worked like a recursive make.  Upon closer
inspection, this only changed the directory when processing the inferior
Conscript file -- all the commands were still issued from the top-level
build directory.  This broke my build using Sun C++ 4.2 -- it couldn't find
the correct sources for template instantiation.  I need CONS to change the
working directory when it's building derived files, not just when it's
reading Conscript files.

Still, after I got over a few of the "CONS is not make" snafus, I really
like CONS.  I'm still pushing for our group to use CONS, but it won't
happen until I can get a fully functional build setup.

Doug Warner