[ILUG] Build Systems

[Darragh Bailey]

Quoting Justin Mason <jm at jmason.org>:
>
> "ln" or "ln -s" would be useful in that case.
>
> --j.

For it to be useful as a build system it needs to be capable to be run as a user
(or at least as close as possible) so hardlinks are out.

The symlink idea looks good though. Have been digging through gnu make manual
and looking to see if it examines the target files of symlinks in deciding if to
rebuilt a target or not.

Best I can find is the following
`-L'
`--check-symlink-times'
    On systems that support symbolic links, this option causes make to consider
the timestamps on any symbolic links in addition to the timestamp on the file
referenced by those links. When this option is provided, the most recent
timestamp among the file and the symbolic links is taken as the modification
time for this target file.

Which suggests that by default make will check the target file of the symlink.

So this looks to be the solution, had previously assumed that make would just
look at the modification time of the target file, even if that was a symlink
which would have meant the real target file would not have been checked. Nice to
see I was wrong  :)


--
Darragh

"Nothing's foolproof to a sufficently talented fool"