[Monotone-devel] Re: package_full_revision.txt and derived files

[Bruce Stephens]

Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 06:29:13PM +0100, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
>> The problem lies in the dependencies, not in the tool.
>> 
>> package_full_revision.txt is currently regarded as a .PHONY, which is
>> the reason it gets constantly rebuilt.  Is there a reason it can't
>> depend on MT/revision?
>
> Yes.  The point of package_full_revision is that it also lists
> uncommitted changes, so that one can tell whether the binary
> actually is the one that MT/revision would suggest.  There's no way
> to do this except by running 'monotone status' on each and every
> build...

Something I've seen other Makefiles do is (in this example) to run
'monotone status' putting the output somewhere, and overwrite
package_full_revision.txt only if the output differs from the old
contents.

Obviously one can add arbitrary hackiness to Makefiles in this way
(with similarly obvious problems in keeping it working on all
platforms).  For the occasional issue like this it seems doable,
though?