[evs] Does EVS remove some of CVS limitations?

Eric B. ebenze at hotmail.com
Tue Feb 5 23:58:37 GMT 2008


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>> 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.

Forgive my lack of knowledge, but what is clearmake and how does it relate 
to the issue?

> 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...

I'm not entirely sure what "late identification" is, but I really don't see 
the Java spec changing anytime soon.  The whole concept of class /file 
naming is pretty much a building block for the language, and while it seems 
incredibly strange to non-Java coders, once you get into it, it actually 
tends to make things a lot easier to work with.  Coming from a C/C++ 
background myself, I found the whole concept incredibly bizarre when I first 
started in Java, but soon got quite accustomed to it.  It is a case of the 
language imposing a certain organization and structure to the coder.

Late identification also won't address other interpreted languages (such as 
HTML) where filenames / locations are critical to proper functionality.

> 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.

Is there a thread somewhere that I can catch up on this conversation?

Thanks,

Eric 




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