POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.programming : What's in a name? : Re: What's in a name? Server Time
20 Apr 2024 04:51:21 EDT (-0400)
  Re: What's in a name?  
From: clipka
Date: 20 Jan 2018 07:01:03
Message: <5a632f7f$1@news.povray.org>
Am 20.01.2018 um 04:06 schrieb dick balaska:
> I was always a little sad that povray uses *.ini and *.inc . Something
> with a little more magic would have been nice instead of ubergenerics
> that many compete for. ("Do you want to open MASM?", um no.)

Remember that back in the days when POV-Ray was originally created, you
didn't open files from the operating system level; rather, you started
the program that you knew would be able to open the file, and told that
program to open the file.


> Today I ran into ./source/core .
> As in:
> 
> rm -f libpovray.a
> rm -f *~ core *.core
> rm: cannot remove 'core': Is a directory
> Makefile:1034: recipe for target 'clean' failed
> 
> This is qmake foo.  core is hardcoded into the clean step. :(
> google says the only option is to rename this directory. :(
> (I fruitlessly tried "QMAKE_CLEAN -= core")

Hmm... the purpose seems to be to delete any coredump files created
during the build process, which would be named `core` - on /some/
systems at any rate.

I'm hesitant what to make of this. In my opinion, ...

- a build process shouldn't expect any of its build steps to core dump;
if a build tool is that unstable, it shouldn't be used at all.

- qmake should at least test whether `core` even is a regular file
(which would be the case if it was a coredump) before attempting to
delete it.

Renaming the directory is a step I'd rather avoid; first, because I do
think `core` is a fitting name, and second, because it would create a
"fault line" in the source code version history.

Can you avoid running qmake from the `./source/` directory? That would
be the easiest way out. Remember that you may have two options there:

- Run qmake from the base directory (`./`).
- Run qmake for each sub-directory of `./source/` separately (i.e.
`./source/backend/`, `./source/base/`, `./source/core/`, etc.

I concede that the latter isn't ideal in case more modules are added in
the future, but maybe that's a bullet to bite. As for the only source
file residing in `./source/` itself, `povmain.cpp`, the code in there is
presumably irrelevant for your project.


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