command-line syntax bikeshed time!

[Evan Martin]

Hey ninja-build,

In https://github.com/martine/ninja/issues/580 qhuo reasonably points out that using caret for file outputs is annoying to the point of unusable on Windows.  Perhaps we could use some different syntax for it.  Do you have any advice?  It's easy enough to just pick another character or prefix to be magical, but maybe there's some additional functionality we ought to be planning for.

I think we chose the caret because git uses it for a similar graph traversal.

I'd normally be tempted to say you could combine two things (like, say "ninja $(ninja -t output foo.cc)") except that the whole point of changing the behavior is to make things better on Windows.

[Nico Weber]

What does git do? They use foo^ on posix too, right?

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[Evan Martin]

Git uses foo^ but it also has foo~1 (foo^^ is the same as foo~2, and so on).  I normally use the latter syntax when I occasionally need to on Windows because of the caret thing.

[Evan Martin]

Random thought: maybe because caret doesn't work on Windows, the appropriate Windows character would be something that didn't work on Linux (so it's disjunctive with the existing caret symbol).  Which implies: how about a trailing dollar sign?

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:49 PM, Evan Martin <mar...@danga.com> wrote:

[Nicolas Desprès]

What about @? It is used by make in $@ to describe the file name of the target of the rule: http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Automatic-Variables.html.

I have been told once that ninja inherits from make :-).

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Nicolas Desprès

[Qingning Huo]

I have another question/request regarding the caret functionality. It seems that the caret syntax always select the first build statement that depends on the given input file. This has two consequences for build statements that share the same input files. (a) which statement is chosen depends purely on their order in the ninja file, (b) there is no equivalent way to select the output files from the other build statement.

So if you are considering a new syntax for this, perhaps we can consider something like rulename: input, or input@rulename.

Thanks
Qingning