RE: hard links vs. sym links

[Zachary Deretsky]

I am using cons on a very large build system running on NT, Solaris and
HPUX.
I am using Greg's ":S" modifier for the compile rules on every platform,
that is
compilation happens from the source directory while intermediate files
reside in the
build directory.

Some of my projects generate intermediate .hpp and .cpp files.
My methods install these .hpp files into the include directory
and copy .cpp files into the original source directory where
compiler can find them. I do not see this pollution of the source
directory to be a problem.

But ":S" flag allows gdb and msdev to find the source files right away
and we can use cons for development as well as for nightly builds.
Developers would not accept cons if they had to manually specify paths
for every source directory (about 90) in gdb.

That is why since last September I have been asking to fold Greg's
(small) changes into the official cons tree and posted a patch some time
ago.
There are other people who use some version of this patch.

Greg, could you move my patch to the current cons and add some
documentation?
Last time Steven was asking for documentation and test cases.

Steven, can we finally add this flag and then people can use it or
not use it; I am pretty sure it does not break anything.

Let us evolve design goals, make them broader.

Thanks, Zach.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
> Behalf Of Greg Spencer
> Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 8:43 AM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: RE: hard links vs. sym links
>
>
> > What I *really* would like is for the compiler error
> messages and gdb
> > messages to refer to the source file!  Unfortunately this conflicts
> with
> > some of cons' design goals.
>
> I just wanted to point out that this is exactly the reason I
> changed my
> NT extensions so that the compiler builds using the "source" of the
> linked files, and outputs to the linked directory.  This was as simple
> as adding a ":S" flag to the substitution code.  That way all
> the error
> messages refer to the right file.  I know it's a little crazy
> (since the
> linked files are pretty much ignored), but they're just hard links
> anyhow (even on NT, as long as you have an NTFS partition).
> On NT this
> is particularly useful since although I use Emacs, most folks want to
> use MSDEV, which has NO concept of links at all, and it blows away the
> link when it saves, which causes the files to be re-linked on the next
> pass, blowing away all your changes, which is FAR less than ideal :-).
>
> My personal feeling is that if something useful goes against a design
> goal, then the design goal should be re-evaluated, along with the
> "something useful" to see if they can be brought to parity.
>
>                               -Greg.
>
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