At 10:57 AM 3/19/01 -0600, you wrote:
>Have you thought about using jikes for dependancy checking? Or even just
>taking the dependancy checking code out of it and using that separatly? It
>is open source and I've found it's dependancy checking to be most excellent.
Yes, I have and rejected it for the following reasons:
1. It does not produce JPDA compatible classes and so the classes that
it produces cannot be debugged with JDEbug or (new)jdb).
2. I have encountered other obscure compile problems with jikes that
have destroyed any confidence that I had in the classes that it creates.
3. I tried using the dependency files that it produced in a make file and
I could never get them to work correctly with make. Yes, all the class
files that needed to be rebuilt would be rebuilt--sometimes many times
because both jikes and make were doing dependency
checking on the same file set, totally unaware of each other. Further,
the dependency files would not work for projects that maintain source
and class files in separate directories, which is the organization that
I favor.
4. Another JDE user has told me that he uses dependency files generated
by jikes but that he has to massage them with a script to get them
to work in a makefile. I don't think a user should have to work that
hard to get
an automatic build system working.
5. Supposing that jikes dependency files worked, using them still would entail
starting a fresh instance of javac for each class (remember, I don't
trust jikes
for compiling). With compile masters, only one invocation of javac is
required
to build an entire project. I'm inclined to believe that building a
project with one invocation
of javac would be faster than building the same project with multiple
invocations
of jikes.
- Paul
