most amendable to build meta features?

[Raoul Duke]

what would be a best approach to being able to ask for any given source input to s build system, what happens to it, and what are all the downstream steps and artifacts that get crested, and which ones are considered tmp vs. to go into the final package?

it would ideally give me an interactive gui that lets me see all the parallel universes that coexist based on all the sundry configuration possibilities. some of which are more fixed than others. 

[David Barbour]

Given a module M, to know all the 'downstream' clients of M you need a system that knows about all the relevant clients. This is only possible by integrating with a central repository, e.g. something like Artifactory that tracks for each project what all of its dependencies are and also maintains a reverse index. 

Perhaps it also recompiles and re-tests everything dependent on module M and tells you about any errors, giving you continuous integration.

If you just want to know the dependencies of module M, or view and debug the intermediate computations to produce M, that's a much easier problem because it can be isolated. Though, it would still require a lot of tooling support to effectively reflect on the compilation process.

[Raoul Duke]

yeah i mean just locally on my own machine. so many times i have to hunt and mentally simulate things in order to figure out where some build input item gets used -> transformed along with other stuff -> something(s) poop(s) out at the end. and the same in reverse, of course. just unconscionable ux. 

[David Barbour]

Even if it's just for your own machine, you'd need some variation on a central Artifactory. It would just be a local instance.