Re: Enhancement request: Watch source files for changes

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 10:24 -0800, Philip Guenther wrote:
> Those are just the sort of items I would consider if this was my
> project; Paul and the other developers may have completely different
> criteria in mind, but I would be surprised if they didn't overlap
> some.

I think all of Philip's points are appropriate.  To my mind the only
real advantage to doing this as a built-in-to-make facility vs. just
having people script it, as Noah did, is if we can work out a way to
make it faster by being built in.  The only way I can see that
happening, realistically, is to avoid the read step and, second and
subsequent times through, we would start after we've already read the
makefiles and before we start trying to build the goals.

However, I think this would be a lot of effort; make is not designed to
be "clean" in that way; as far as I know there's no simple way to get
back to that fresh, "just read" state (no "Irish Spring" for make
internals! :-)).  Make really just exits when its done and lets the
system recover all its resources, rather than spending time running
around freeing things etc.


So offhand I think this is a lot of work for not a huge amount of gain.
Anyway that's my $0.02.