Peter Todd wrote:

> yeah, cvs works fine for binaries
> too, though the diff function doesn't work. 

cvsnt has a new server side diff plugin that allows you to define custom
diff programs -- where you have one for a specific type of binary or other
file. (Often being a text file is not enough for a normal diff to work --
there are complex XML text files that just don't work well through a common
diff, even though they are "text" files.)

> unison is rather neat, it's a program that takes two directories, on the
> same or different machines, and "unifies" them to have a consistant
> state. 

Also as Windows binary available, equally handy -- for the ones from the
dark side :)

> make is also an excellent program once you see what it can do. In one
> recent project I used it to automatically keep track of serial numbers
> and device numbers in a device with 64 seperate pic chips controlling 64
> stepper motors. Did all the record keeping automatically. Other times
> I've used it, along with perl scripts, to automatically generate stuff
> like microstepping stepper motor tables automatically. 

What I don't like with make is the dependency tracking. Say you have
fileA.h that includes fileB.h. fileA.c includes fileA.h, and therefore is
dependent on both fileA.h and fileB.h. But if you tell make only the
existing dependencies, you'd have to create a special rule that bumps the
timestamp of fileA.h if fileB.h is newer, so that fileA.c gets rebuilt if
fileB.h changes. But that then doesn't go well with a versioning system,
because fileA.h didn't actually change. 

The only workaround I've found so far is to "manually" do the dependency
tracking in the make file, through variables that contain the dependency
lists. Which is a pain. 

I thought about looking into making ant work for C builds. Anybody any
experience? Would it handle the dependencies better?

Gerhard

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