[Scons-dev] Likely bug - installing side effect files

[Dirk Bächle]

On 03.11.2014 14:44, Ben Golding wrote:
> Hi Dirk,
>
> Thanks for the clarification.
>
> Nevertheless, what effect does this "marking" of the side effect file actually have during the build? What can I usefully do with the object returned by SideEffect()?
Not very much, I'm afraid...and why would you want to anyway? I'm not a 
native speaker, so take it with a grain of salt please that it appears 
obvious to me, that declaring a file as "SideEffect" means that I don't 
really care about it.

> Does it have an effect during the parallel build? (like a mutex, restricting that only one builder instance can run concurrently if they share the same hard-coded filename)
Yes, it does exactly that.
>
> > Another thing that "SideEffect()" does, is to mark the file for getting
> > removed on a "scons -c". In the past, this has misled many writers of
> > builders/tools, to use SideEffect() in favour of the more correct Clean()...
>
> If you are correct, this behaviour is certainly in contradiction with the docs:
> http://scons.org/doc/latest/HTML/scons-user/apd.html#f-sideeffect
In the passage above I was referring to the "might be removed as part of 
cleaning the directory in which it lives" part...sorry, if this got you 
confused.

Regards,

Dirk