Re: was: RE: auto-dep cannot possibly work?

[David Boyce]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 2:40 AM, Mark Galeck (CW) <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi David,  well yes I hope we are all friends and all that, never intended 
> otherwise, and apologize if I made a different impression.
>
> Yes, to your comment on depending on directories, yes I understand it, but 
> the way people (developers) understand make, is that it depends on files not 
> directories, if I made it otherwise, they will rise against me!  For not 
> being able to trash their development directories with temporary files.  If, 
> following your suggestion, I have a separate directory with symlinks, then I 
> will have to tell them, that when they create a new header file, they will 
> have to put a link to it in the symlinks directory, not to mention, that the 
> "bizarre" case that we started with, won't work with single directory, 
> because it is the same file name as another file.  So, I would have to have a 
> duplicate dir structure in my symlinks.  People will not follow that.

I believe we're closing in on agreement ...

Whether the pain of doing it 'right' in your own environment is worth
it is of course your call. Our interest here on the mailing list is
diagnosing the disease; whether the patient actually takes his
medicine is secondary. I just wanted to make clear for the archives
that the problem you posed has a solution which is objectively
correct. As is usually the case, it's easier to get started doing
things right than retrofitting righteousness into an existing culture,
so this discussion might help other people with future environments.

The only other thing I'll say is that some people consider it a good
idea to divide headers into "public" and "private" and keep public
headers in a separate structure, i.e. not down in the same trenches
where source files live. But here elegance is in the eye of the
beholder. The symlink idea was just mentioned as a way to simulate
this. BTW I was not suggesting a singular symlink directory though it
would be a nice cheap solution to the problem since as you note it
would be impossible to occlude an existing header when the search is
only in one place.

David Boyce