Re: [KBUILD] Re: Announcing CML2, a replacement for the kbuild system

From: Eric S. Raymond (esr@thyrsus.com)
Date: Fri May 26 2000 - 21:07:36 EST


Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:
> > CML2 is aimed at this. It will never be perfect -- perfection would require
> > a full theorem prover -- but it's already good enough to handle normal
> > ancestry relationships.
>
> Our relationships are heirarchical so you can build a dependancy graph and
> then recursively backtrack to find the dependancies.

Yeah, but it's a DAG rather than a tree. There are other things that
complexify it, too. Like the difference between "suppress dependant"
and "suppress" -- sometimes ancestor symbols affect the valid range
of a symbol, sometimes they don't.

Consider the case where you fail a contraint while backtracking. It's
not obvious what the right policy is -- I've identified at least four
possibilities and I can think of circumstances where each one is right
and the other three wrong.

I certainly don't have all the answers. But I'm trying to get us to
a place where we can explore the questions without tripping over our
own damn feet.

-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

"The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being..." -- J.G.A. Pocock, describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S.

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