[jamming] Path specification (was: Majam - keeping, jamup-to-date)

[Kai Backman]

On 8/15/06, Mihai Christodorescu <mihai at cs.wisc.edu> wrote:
> Why not make all paths be in portable mode by default? You would have to
> specify :N for a path in native format, otherwise no specification would
> be needed.

 The reason is we don't know what is a path and what isn't. Jam will
frequently get input from sources like environment variables or files
produced by scripts like configure. Some of these may be paths, most
of the paths probably in native format. The catch is, we don't know
which are paths and which are just string. Just looking at the
characters might tell us the string is a valid path but it might
actually be used for something else and we mangle it. In other words,
we have to rely on the writer of the script to tag the valid paths
using the :I modifier.

 Jam itself would only recognize internal paths, everything else is
just an opaque string.

 Kai

-- 
Kai Backman, Software Engineer, kaib at google.com