Creating dependancies with remote objects

My question is somewhat related to the one recently discussed in
the 'inhibit copying' thread...

I was having similar issues with the way 'Link' was linking source
files around...  I had managed to get xemacs to do the right thing
with the links, but it struck me as a messy way to do things...  At
least partially because I lost an hour or so of work by changing the
wrong files in xemacs (before I fixed it), and having the links
remade.  <sigh>

So I independantly came up with a solution similar to the ObjectsInDir
method that Johan discussed in his thread of last June (I called it
RemoteObjects, the behaviour was the same - works like Objects, but
puts the output files in a different directory).

The part of the solution that I'm not too happy with is getting a
dependancy from the source directory to the output files.  The issue
is that since there are no files in the source directory than depend
on anything - doing a 'cons -t .' in the source directory results in
absolutely nothing happening...  Doing a 'cons .' in the root
directory works, and so does 'cons path/to/objects_or_libs', but when
using xemacs' compile mode, it's much easier to just do a 'cons -t .'

The hack that I have figured out that works, but is fairly ugly, is to
add something like

   Command $lenv  "$localdir/dummy", $LIB, "touch %>";

Where $localdir is the directory containing the source, and $LIB is
the library generated from the source... This is moderately functional
(and if I add the target system name into the name of the dummy file
will probably even handle multiple platforms.  But it seems clunky.

Does anyone have any better suggestions?  Have I framed the problem
clearly enough?  Or should I construct a sample directory that
illustrates the issue?

Thanks,

Warren



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