Progress on Perforce Jam

From: David Abrahams (david.abrahams_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-04 15:45:06

Hi,

There's been a lot of action on the jamming mailing list recently, as you
can see at http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/jamming/. Matt Armstrong
and Craig McPheeters have been especially active in contributing useful
fixes and enhancements, many of which we can use, and the Perforce people
are beginning the project of rolling the outside enhancements back into the
official source. They have not contacted me about getting our enhancements,
which probably means that they are not going to take them in this round. In
part, I guess this is because the Boost.Jam source has moved too far away
from the Perforce code for their taste. On the other hand, there are a
number of changes which would make a lot of sense for them to adopt. For
example:

Win95 support
Elmination of fixed-sized buffers and associated overruns
Reference-counting bug fixes
Error reporting backtraces
Reporting of source line numbers in -d+5 dumps
Argument lists and rule argument checking
...probably others...

We should discuss what response we should have to this situation, if any. If
Perforce Jam is going to be actively developed, there would be significant
advantages to staying close to it.

-Dave

===================================================
David Abrahams, C++ library designer for hire
resume: http://users.rcn.com/abrahams/resume.html

C++ Booster (http://www.boost.org)
email: david.abrahams_at_[hidden]
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