Re: [Boost-build] bjam -f and BB v2

From: João Abecasis (jpabecasis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-15 07:16:31

Rene Rivera wrote:
> João Abecasis wrote:
>> Rene Rivera wrote:
>>> João Abecasis wrote:
>>>> Hi everyone!
>>>>
>>>> Playing around with BB and bjam I came across and odd behaviour with 
>>>> the -f option. This option allows one to override the built-in 
>>>> Jambase file with a custom one.
>>>>
>>>> When I run 'bjam -ffile', that is without intervening spaces, as 
>>>> documented in --help-usage, bjam will pick file and everything runs 
>>>> smoothly.
>>>>
>>>> If, however, I run it as 'bjam -f file', with a space between, bjam 
>>>> will still pick up the file argument appropriately, only this will 
>>>> confuse boost-build into believing file is actually a target to 
>>>> build, thus putting aside other targets:
>>>>
>>>>      > bjam
>>>>      ...found 187 targets...
>>>>      > bjam -f Jambase
>>>>      ...found 2 targets...
>>>>
>>>> Is this intended?
>>> Hm, no. It should not consider that name a target. Could you post a 
>>> bug to the SF tracker about this, for future TODO and reference. 
>>> Assign it to me :-)
>> Would a working patch help? (see attached)
> 
> Of course :-)

;-)

>> Is this the right approach and can it be applied to CVS?
> 
> Hm, I thought the problem was in bjam and not boost.build. So I'm not 
> sure about the patch itself.

 From my investigations, after processing its options bjam passes the 
command-line untouched in ARGV, so I'm not sure how we'd fix bjam, in 
this case.

Are you saying bjam shouldn't accept "-f Jambase" or do you think bjam 
should normalize the options it recognizes to the no-space versions, 
before passing control to the build system? Or some other option, entirely?

> But there are other options that take an 
> extra argument that would have the same problem if they are not being 
> handled at the boost.build level.

You're right, there other single letter options that take an argument 
and may have the same problem. I missed that. The complete set is: '-' 
(yep!), 'l', 'd', 'j', 'f', 's', 't' and 'o'.

The attached patch, still in the same direction as the previous, is 
updated to handle all options. (If this is still not the right approach, 
no harm done ;-)

Incidentally, I noticed that the -l (action timeout) and -g (build from 
newest sources first) are not documented in --help-usage. One may still 
get the description for '-l' with a syntax error in the command-line, 
like 'bjam -h' :-)

Best regards,

João