From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2005-04-06T21:41:34+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Rant 0.3.2

Quoting jim@weirichhouse.org, on Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 01:29:33PM +0900:
> 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.

That makes sense.

> 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).

Yes, there are lots of dependency generators around. gcc will do it,
makedepends (distributed with X) does it well. Integrating with make is
easy:

  DEPS := $(wildcard *.c)

  .depends: $(DEPS)
    makedepend -f- -- $(CFLAGS) -- $^ > $@

  # If you include another makefile that doesn't exist, rake tries to find
  # a rule to make it, and if a rule says that .depends depends on a file,
  # make will remake .depends, then include it anew.
  -include .depends

> 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.

And since ruby isn't compiled, doesn't seem like there is a lot of need
for dependency generation.

Cheers,
Sam