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Trying to make SCons Ada Builder work with VariantDir

I'm struggling with the last pieces of logic to make our Ada builder work as expectedly with variantdir. The problem is caused by the fact that the inflexible tools gnatbind and gnatlink doesn't allow the binder files to be placed in a directory other than the current one. This leaves me with two options:

  • Let gnatbind write the the binder files to topdir and then let gnatlink pick it from there. This may however cause race conditions if we want to allow simulatenous builds for different architectures and compiler versions which we want.

  • Modify the calls to gnatbind and gnatlink to temporarily go down to the build directory, in our case build/$ARCH/src-path. I successfully fixed the gnatbind step as this is explicitly called using a env.Execute from within the Ada builder. To try to fix the linking step I've modified the Program env using

    env["LINKCOM"] = SCons.Action.Action(ada_linkcom)

where ada_linkcom is defined as

def ada_linkcom(source, target,env ):
    ....
    return ret

where ret is a string describing what should be done in the shell. I need this to be a function it contains a bit complicated logic to convert paths from being relative to top-level to just containing their basenames.

This however fails with an error in scons-2.3.1/SCons/Executor.py on line 347 in function do_execute. Isn't env["LINKCOM"] allowed to be a function with ada_linkcom's signature?

Solution

  • No, it's not. You seem to think that 'env["LINKCOM"]' is what actually calls/executes the final build command, and that's not quite correct. Instead, environment variables like LINKCOM get expanded by the Executor/Builder for each specified Action, and are then executed.

    You can have Python functions as Actions, and also use a so-called "generator" to create your Action strings on-the-fly. But you have to assign this Action to a Builder, and can't set it as an environment variable directly.

    Please also have a look at the UserGuide ( http://www.scons.org/doc/production/HTML/scons-user.html ), especially section 18.4 "Builders That Execute Python Functions". Our basic guide for writing Builders and Tools might also prove to be helpful: http://www.scons.org/wiki/ToolsForFools