Friday, May 18, 2007

Off Line Development

After numerous requests I have finally implemented off-line development. You no longer have to be connected to build your projects. In the past the dependency analysis task ran every build and if it thought that there was a chance that the dependencies had changed it connected to the repository to check the dependencies. This no longer happens. There is now a check_depends task that checks to make sure that dependencies have been run at some time in the past. It then checks if the dependencies need to be updated. If the dependencies do need to be updated it asks the user if he wants to update the dependencies (by connecting to the server). If the answer is affirmative then the update occurs if not then it continues with the existing dependencies. The user may run dependencies at any time by running the depends task directly. This approach gives users much, much more control over when and how dependencies are resolved. It also allows the user to control when and how the build system connects to the repository. I hope I have done this in such a way as to not add any additional burden to the user.