On Mon, 2002-05-06 at 06:30, Tom Tromey wrote: > Nowadays we could probably implement pattern rules purely in automake. > Back in the old days we didn't have the machinery to allow this. > Automake itself was too primitive. But now it would be more possible, > if someone were motivated. Maybe this would help with the > longstanding CORBA problems? > > Tom
Hi Tom, Certainly would. The problem I had with suffix rules, was that one invocation of the idl compiler on one .idl file expands into many .h and .cpp files, therefore I needed a suffix rule for each product. So far so good, but when I do a parallel build the rules then race each other and overwrite each others products (as the compiler always writes all files), which can be bad if the compiler is reading one of those files at the time.. My solution is to wrap a locking script around the suffix rules so that any one .idl file only has the idl compiler run on it once. I guess if automake was to do the pattern->suffix rule conversion itself it would ship with such a script (in a similar way to the packaging of depcomp etc), and use it to protect the generated rules against parallel builds. Alex.
