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

[Miklós Fazekas]

In actions we already know items that are path specifications for  
sure. IMHO any variable that was bind to a phisical location in  
filesystem should be printed in native format. (That includes target,  
source, and any variable marked for bind in actions declaration)

Regards,
Miklós

On Aug 16, 2006, at 9:00 PM, jamming-request at perforce.com wrote:

> Kai wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I believe that Kai and Mihai are saying the same thing here:
>
> Jam internally uses only paths in internal format. Therefore:
> 1) Script writers have to tag those native paths with :I (if the paths
> originate from some external source like an envvar).
> 2) Paths written directly in jam scripts do not have to be tagged in
> any way.
> 3) Items used in action strings have to be tagged :N because the
> commands will expect them to be in native format.
>
> Am I right?
>
>
> Alen

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/jamming/attachments/20060817/83d7d656/attachment.html