Re: [jamboost] Replacing GNU make's VPATH with bjam's SEARCH?

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-04-08 06:12:37

On Thursday 07 April 2005 19:19, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 10:45:15AM +0400, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> > It's util/path.jam
> > If you're using anonymous CVS, there's some unspecified delay before
> > changes are pushed there. If the file contains rule call 'glob-really',
> > it's the new version.
>
> OK, I got your patch, and it seems to fix things (unfortunately
> it looks like there is a report of problems on Windows). So now
> this example works (on Linux at least), where it didn't before:
>
> exe hello : [ glob /tmp/foo1/*.cpp ] ;

Ok, good. I'll look into Windows problems in a moment.

> I've been using this workaround which works with and without your patch:
>
> import path ;
> DIRS = /tmp/foo1
> SRC = hello.cpp
>
> SOURCE = [ path.glob $(DIRS) : $(SRC) ] ;
>
>
>
> While this works, this is not as straightforward
> as I would have liked. What exactly are
> the SEARCH and SEARCH_SOURCE variables used for,

The first is used internally by bjam to list the directories where it looks 
for a file. The second is classic-jam only thing, it's not used in 
Boost.Build.

> and can they not be used at all for doing VPATH-like things?

Possible, but this is not exactly a one-line patch. First, you can't directly 
specify SEARCH because the names of actual bjam targets depend on toolset and 
features. So, we could try this:

project : source-location /tmp/foo /tmp/bar ;

But then, we need to examine all the places where source-location is used and 
update them. 

- Volodya