Re: [Boost-build] Shortening target paths

From: Bojan Resnik (resnikb_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-11 02:42:51

> Trying to optimize target paths in any meaningful way is a loosing
> battle. I favor going the "compression of path" direction. As I mention
> on that bug report compressing the target path with a hash function
> seems the easiest and most stable long term solution to the problem. The
> drawback of course is the reduced clarity that not having a readable
> path poses to users.

  I personally do not have any problem with long paths - they are
descriptive and predictable, and so can easily be used by external
scripts. Hashed paths lack this predictability, and it would be much
harder to write scripts that work with them, or to manually create a
distribution from outputs (this is also needed sometimes).

  The only problem I see with the current paths is that they can
potentially become too long for the system. Perhaps some sort of
abbreviations would be nice to have? For example, variant and feature
rules could have an additional, optional, argument that would be the
name of the directory created for the item in question. This way,
'debug' could be abbreviated to just 'd'.

--
Bojan Resnik