[darcs-users] make continuous

[Trent W. Buck]

Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:

>> make continuous [is gone] this is something we may want to get back
>> -- the best approach I can think of is to patch searchpath to use
>> cabal to do the work: either that, or write a new tool... original
>> searchpath seems to be gone and it's a good deal of spaghetti with
>> load of features we don't care about
>
> Collateral damage.  Hopefully we'll find something to replace this.

I was thinking about this in ##workingset (a Freenode IRC channel for
the POSIX development toolchain) recently:

twb> Is it possible to hook up GNU Make to inotify, so that as soon as a
twb> source file is modified, it will trigger a rebuild of dependents?

twkm> changing gmake so it is a daemon that waits for events from the
twkm> o/s would limit its portability, but i wouldn't doubt they'd
twkm> consider doing it if it sounded cool enough.
twkm>
twkm> foo.c is too complex, you create bar.c, notified-gmake spits at
twkm> you because it doesn't know crap about it yet, pull stuff out of
twkm> foo.c, app no longer compiles or links because bar.c hasn't be
twkm> written yet, ...  but yeah, eventually all would be well.
twkm>
twkm> dnotify -MCDR $(find . -type d) -e make &
twkm>
twkm> dnotify can't handle a directory named -e, and that particular
twkm> command can't handle directories with whitespace in their names,
twkm> but otherwise it would thrash when almost anything was changed.