Re: [Ltib] merge package and symlinks

[Stuart Hughes]

Hi Andrea,

Aside from the fact merge directories are best avoided if you can, I 
think this is okay.

I think the better of the two approaches is the -H option to find.  The 
reason is I think the trailing / is using shell completion (?) and so 
may be shell dependent (dash etc).

I think I'll go ahead and check in find -H .....

Regards, Stuart

Andrea Galbusera wrote:
> Hi Stuart,
>
> I faced the need to keep in sync a couple of ltib trees. This is a need
> particularly for my merge dir. As a temporary solution, I'm trying to
> make the merge dir of one tree a symlink to the corrisponding merge dir
> of the other tree. That would prevent me from loosing updates of those
> files.
>
> Next step was to check if ltib was correctly detecting changes in the
> files of the target dir. Since this was not working as I expected -
> namely the merge package was not re-packaged even after applying changes
> to merge files - I inspected a little bit ltib's code and found out the
> following routine, which I suppose is responsible to detect changes:
>
> sub check_merge_updates
> {
>     my ($pcf) = @_;
>     my $spec = get_spec("merge");
>     if( ! -w "$cf->{rfsbase}/etc/ltib-release") {
>         touch($spec);
>         return 1;
>     }
>     foreach my $dir ( $ENV{PLATFORM_PATH}, $ENV{TOP} ) {
>         next unless -d "$dir/merge";
>         local $_ = `find $dir/merge -newer $spec 2>/dev/null`;
>         warn "newer than $spec: $_\n" if $_ && $verbose;
>         touch($spec), last if $_;
>     }
>     return 1;
> }
>
> A change to the find command line was enough for me to make things
> happen as expected. I added a trailing "/" to the path that is passed to
> find and now the command is detecting changes even behind the symlink.
>
> Namely I changed:
> local $_ = `find $dir/merge -newer $spec 2>/dev/null`;
> into:
> local $_ = `find $dir/merge/ -newer $spec 2>/dev/null`;
>
> By further reading find's manpage, I then noticed the -H command line
> options that could bring a similar result (not verified yet).
>
> I'd like to have a comment from you on this. 
> First: do you see any bad side-effect in making merge dir a symlink at
> all? If this is not evil, do you believe it could be useful to patch
> ltib and allow it detect changes even in this case? My patch suggestion
> could not be the best fix anyway... please comment!
>
> T.I.A.
> Regards,