Re: about Jacks' functioning

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Toni" == Toni Masse <toni.masse@ateji.com> writes:

Sorry about the big delay in my reply.

Toni> My team and me would like to use Jacks to test our own java compiler,
Toni> however I'm not very experienced with Tcl;
Toni> so I'd like to know how Jacks determines the compilation result (I've
Toni> looked in jacks.tcl but I'm not sure about the exact behavior of
Toni> Jacks),

The proc named _exec_impl is used to actually invoke the compiler.
This chunk invokes it:

        set cmd "exec $prog $prog_flags $prog_args > exec.out 2> exec.err"

        if {[info exists ::env(JACKS_EXEC_DEBUG)]} {
            puts stderr "JACKS_EXEC_DEBUG: $cmd"
        }

        eval $cmd

This is wrapped in a 'catch' clause; Tcl's exec command throws an
exception if the exec "fails", which in Tcl means that either it
really fails (command not found or something) or that the command
returns a non-zero exit status.  I'm not sure how this works on other
platforms.

Toni> and why is a cvs client needed to generate the change file (with
Toni> "jacks loggen" command)? Could I deactivate it?

Yeah, I've always wondered about this myself.  The jacks logging stuff
seems a bit user-unfriendly.  I'm sure it can be deactivated somehow.

Tom