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Marc,
For some reason I haven't seen your post on the newsgroup yet, did you get
any message from the server when you sent it?
> Isn't this issue a limitation of the version control paradigm?
> A case in which some kind of late identification would be far better.
> The problem is not with merging proper.
>
Yes - hence why I said:
> It's been a very long time since I've needed to modify a makefile because
> a file changed it's name or a file was added. There is syntax to look for
> all *.c files (or whatever) and loop cc -c {filename} or whatever.
Which is a crude but effective form of late identification (you identify
what needs to be compiled at compile time based on what is available). A
better solution would be to get the list of things to compile from the SCM
system, hence why I said:
> not the CM system. Yes I do believe we need a better open source build
> system - there is no equivalent for things like 'clearmake' in the FOSS
> world and there should be.
Late identification is really the solution for Java too - but since the
'Java' spec and compilers are rather fixed in their ways I suspect we just
have to be pragmatic and do something that can support the 'broken' way they
already work (there is no 'clearjavac' for good reason). The ideal result
would be if a member of the Java compiler team wanted to add support for
late identifiction - that'd be terrific! It just takes a single call to an
API to resolve every reference like eric.functional.Example into either
eric.functional.Example (the default) or eric.test.TestExample etc based on
rules the plugin used in the API knows about (eg: an SCM system that knows
about the context/branch/usecase). Chances of this happening I think are
about equal to me winning the jackpot in the lottery when I don't actually
buy a ticket...
All that said - the reason we had such a long discussion on c.s.config-mgmt
about build was that the CM terminology and some of the reasoning behind
'clearmake' and other commercial CM/build systems was not clear to me until
you and some others explained it (which if you may recall took quite a lot
of iterations), so I can't fault Gerhard or Eric or anyone else for not
picking up on it.
Regards,
Arthur