From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2005-04-06T13:29:33+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Rant 0.3.2

On Tuesday 05 April 2005 11:40 pm, Sam Roberts wrote:
> > >If by managing file dependencies you mean automatically detect and
> > >maintain the file dependencies, you are correct.  But it is easy to get
> > >other tools to work with rake to do that.
>
> I'm a little surprised, I though rake was supposed to be make, but with
> the rules written in ruby, and maintaining file dependecies is all make
> does well.

I'm not sure what the original poster meant, and tried to clarify it in my 
response.  Perhaps I was unclear myself.

> What does it mean to not maintain dependencies? What doesn't it do? If
> I say (with gmake notation):
>
>   a: b.o
>
>   %.o:%.c
>
>   %.c: %.lex

Given the explicit declaration that a depends upon b.o and the rules to 
build .o from .c and .c from .lex, Rake (like make and its brethren) will 
figure out how to make a from b.lex.

What Rake will /not/ do is examine your source code base and figure out that 
this .o file depends on these .c files and all the header files that need to 
be included in the dependency.  I don't believe that make does that either, 
(although I recall something about gmake in conjunction with files generated 
by gcc doing something like that).

What I usually do, is run a simple dependency detection program that outputs 
either rake code directly, or something that can easily be read and converted 
into Rake tasks and dependencies.

-- 
-- 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)