flx now has a new switch:
flx --force-compiler
This implies --force.
What --force does is force flx to invoke the compiler flxg, even if it thinks
some files are up to date *except* if you're trying to run an executable
in which case it will run even if the files it was built with are not up to
date.
The latter is so you can run binaries at all, without the sources.
I will fix that presently (it isn't consistent and there's no workaround).
However --force does not make the flxg compiler rebuild anything,
it just forces flx to invoke it (modulo caveat above).
The --force-compiler switch passes --force to the flxg compiler which
now makes it rebuild the syntax automaton, the libraries, and reparse
all the application program as well, that is, it is a total rebuild where
all caches are considered dirty.
The primary issue here is that when I am building and testing Felix,
I am using tools *written in Felix* to do this. If I make a bug .. and I make
bugs regularly .. then every change would cause the very tools I am using
to build things to themselves get rebuilt and fail due to the bug.
This allows me to write in the Makefile:
flxg:
# building flxg
build/release/host/bin/flx --test=build/release src/tools/flx_build_flxg
cp tmp-dir/flxg build/release/host/bin
copy:
# copying ./src to build/release/src
build/release/host/bin/flx --test=build/release
src/tools/flx_build_rtl \
--repo=.\
--target-dir=build/release \
--target-bin=host \
--copy-repo
Note that I am calling flx to run the programs "flx_build_flxg"
and "flx_build_rtl". The binary is cached, but I'm doing the run
via the source file name. If I do this:
flx --clean
the caches get deleted and these tools get rebuilt automatically.
So if there's a bug, I cannot do the --clean or I'll end up without
the tools, and have to revert to the Python build.
But apart from cherrypicking deletes on the cache, there was no other
way to rebuild and rerun the regression test cases, without also
rebuilding the build tools .. and the idea of the regression tests is
to find bugs and fix them, so I need the build tools to remain intact
using the old (unbugged) code until all the bugs are killed.
The --force option didn't fix this properly: it rebuilt the tests
as required but it didn't rebuild the standard library.
In principle, --force-compiler should be automatic when flx detects
the compiler has changed, and that would be fine even in my
bootstrapping case, provided fully built executables are
not rebuilt.
So there's another change coming. We need an option like
flx --run fred
which will run the executable fred if it exists, without building it,
even if the dependencies changed. In fact we need this to run
any non-cached program (to get the environment variables for
plugins right).
This more or less happens now without the --run switch.
The problem is that it shouldn't: its inconsistent.
In principle
flx program
is supposed to run program.flx and the binary is supposed
to be just a cached value, and with that interpretation
if any of the dependencies are missing, including of course
the source program.flx, the execution should fail.
But I cannot make that happen without the --run switch
or the only way to run binaries would be like:
program
for a static linked exe or
flx_arun program.dylib
for a shared lib (on OSX) and both of these could fail if any
dynamic loading was required (since "flx" wasn't there to
get the paths right). You should be able to do this, but you
shouldn't HAVE to.
--
john skaller
skal...@users.sourceforge.net
http://felix-lang.org
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