On Fri, 13 Nov 2009, Raul Miller wrote: > On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 10:03 PM, bill lam <[email protected]> wrote: > > I got a fancy idea. How about just use the real MakeFile and shell > > execute 'make' to build target, test or install? > > Which flavor of "make" were you thinking of?
gnu make (windows users can use nmake) > Note also that make wants to build files from > other files, mostly with extension based rules, > and with unix shell for some of the low level > work. So a related question is: which version > of unix shell should be installed with J? bash (the only shell that I used, I heard there is a 'powershell' in vista but never tried) > And then there's the issue of building a user > interface for it. A full interface for make would > be complicated, and a simple interface would > cause problems for hand-edited makefiles. no user interface needed, just edit using any text editor > All of which makes me think that this approach > should be piloted outside the main focus on > J development, to see if a useful approach is > doable. The last PM was heavily binded to gui that it didn't work on jconsole. I think the new PM should be built on a handful of class/verb/api that are callable from both gui or command-line interface. If it will be actually implemented in this manner, then it should be feasible to use makefile/scripts. I can think of a scenario that use makefile to build and test. Suppose a regression was reported but it is unclear in which commit was it introduced. Then you can choose the current commit (contains regression) and a known good commit (no regression) and bisect, checkout and 'make test', depending the test succeeded or failed, choose the appropriate commit and bisect again, and so on to locate a commit that introduced regression. Calling from gui based PM for this sort of operation is rather awkward. -- regards, ==================================================== GPG key 1024D/4434BAB3 2008-08-24 gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 4434BAB3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
