From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2004-06-22T19:40:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Rake and timestamps (ideoms or methods?)

Phil Tomson wrote:
> Jim,
> 
> Thanks, this helps explain a lot about Rake.
> 
> You guessed correctly that ncvhdl is a compiler.  ncelab is sort of like a 
> linker.  Unfortuneatly each .vhd file doesn't compile to a 
> corresponding .vhdo file (object file) - that would be nice.  All of the 
> comilation units get put into a package file in a different directory - the 
> same package file, so each .vhd file gets compiled and added to the 
> project's .pkg file which makes it hard to figure out if you really need to 
> recompile a particular .vhd file (not Rake's problem, though, this is  a 
> problem with the compiler/linker tool and it would present a problem for 
> make as well).

You could embed ncvhdl into a script that produces a .vhdo file whose 
only purpose is to provide a time stamp for rake to key off of.  A 
little kludgey, but if compile times are long it might be worth it.

Here's another idea.  Is there any way to get the time that a particular 
file was added package file?  Perhaps the package file has internally 
embedded dates and time?  If so, and you can write some ruby code to 
pull that information out, then you could extend the FileTask object by 
overriding the timestamp method.  That would be a really cool use of 
rake that went beyond the capabilities of make.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich    jim@weirichhouse.org     http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)