[Scons-dev] Possible minor bug + how to get (or assign) a builder to a file node?

[Left Right]

> 1. What are your inputs?

> 2. What are your outputs?

> 3. How do you determine flags for "compiling"?



> Based on your previous emails:



>     "the compiler does almost all the job, it find the required sources

>     by inferring from the code what it should be looking for"




> So it parses the sources looking for info on it's dependencies?



>     "For instance, the compiler has a concept of modules, so it would

>     compile a group of files, and then would compile a module using the

>     first group in a similar way you'd use headers in C, when linking

>     dynamic libraries."



> How does it determine the modules?



>     "Step 1: I've overridden _execute in FlashBuilderBase in order to be

>     able to gather some important information about the project (often

>     times Flash comes with Eclipse-style project files, so I'm parsing

>     the project file, and interpret the information I find in it in a

>     way it will be useful later during the build)."



> Is the project file for all sources you're trying to compile, or per

> module, or some other grouping?



> As Gary stated in another email, you probably can use a separate

> environment per group of code to get the appropriate flags to them.



> -Bill


The inputs fall under 5 major categories:
- Eclipse-style project
-- Flash Builder project
-- FDT project
These are usually XML files that describe a project, they contain
compilation settings, maybe for multiple sub-projects, this is more
like SLN files in MSVS. So, I'm parsing these and trying to come up
with a way to run the compiler (+ some other tools some times) to
replicate what would IDE do during the compilation process.

- FlashDevelop project
This is similar to Eclipse projects except for there may be multiple
projects in the same directory.

- Single source file as an input (possible variants are *.as, *.mxml or *.css)

- Multiple source files or a manifest containing a list of files to compile.

- AIR project is a kind of project which uses a special manifest file.
Using this manifest file it packages what was compiled from other
sources.

- Documentation generator, this is very similar to multi-source one.


The outputs may be:
- a single SWF or SWC files (an applet binary or a library)
- multiple codependent SWFs or SWCs.
- documentation (multiple HTML files)
- AIR executables, Android installers and iOS installers

Flags for compiling:
The compiler comes with a file with most of the defaults set in some
way, there are these possible ways to override these defaults:
- provide an additional (xml) file with settings (that's how I'm going
to go about compilation).
- specify these settings on command line when calling the compiler (in
the worst case you risk to overload the command line, it may easily
get too long).
- read some of them from the source code - there are some particular
compiler metadata that instructs it about project settings / parts
(none of my concerns, the compiler will do here on its own)
- some, however very few can be set as environment variables, this is
not an idiomatic way to do it, and only very few (basically, only the
compiler location and some Java-related settings) can be set in this
way - again, none of my concerns. The script would however very likely
need to read the compiler location from user in some way - it's
uncommon to install compiler on PATH / alias it for availability or
similar. It is rather more common to have multiple version installed
simultaneously.


> So it parses the sources looking for info on it's dependencies?

It's not that simple... some times you need to "help" it. I.e. you may
force including a source, which isn't referenced directly from code,
or you may ask it to not link statically a particular source, because
you will provide it at runtime. And, in case when you compile a
library, you will most certainly be looking for the list of sources on
your own (just list all sources in a directory is what will do in most
cases).


> How does it determine the modules?

It knows certain classes that extend certain other classes to be the
modules. But this is a lot of parsing! I'm not doing it no way! :) But
if it comes in a shape of Eclipse project, I'll have that info from
the project settings.


> Is the project file for all sources you're trying to compile, or per

> module, or some other grouping?


Well, there are different kinds of projects... FlashDevelop projects
have only one target per project and don't define modules. Only
FlashBuilder or FDT projects do. In all other cases users would have
to mimic what projects do on their own. I.e. they would define two
projects as depending on each other etc.

There's a lot more stuff I hoped to do at some point (alternative
compilers, linkers, transcoders etc) but I won't go into details now.

Re' environment. I'm not sure yet... can I somehow make users create a
different environment, when they do Env()? To be honest, I can't find
a way to change anything about this object, I took it for granted that
this is what I'm to deal with. I mean, in a builder I can at least
redo things that don't work in the way I need, but I don't think I'm
able to affect the environment object, besides using it as is. For
example, if I try to add environment variables - it just filters them
away for some reason :|

Best.

Oleg