Re: GNAT corrupted builds with below second changes

[Bojan Bozovic <bozovic.bojan@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 7:52:20 PM UTC+1, Shark8 wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 14, 2018 at 4:36:34 AM UTC-6, Alejandro R. Mosteo wrote:
> > 
> > I will guess here that the timestamp being used has 
> > second precision. This leads to supposedly up-to-date builds that 
> > aren't, among other funny effects.
> 
> This is one reason I advocate a DB-based solution rather than an FS-based solution; after all, the FS solution *IS* simply using the FS as an ad-hoc and anemic database, and using the timestamp-field this way is essentially analogous to querying a 'time' column when what we *REALLY* want is a 'version' column (not "1.2.3" but more like "build # X").
> 
> A lot of problems with build-systems come from (a) using the FS as an ad-hoc DB, and (b) the differences in the FS like "/ vs \ vs :" directory separators, or case-insensitive vs case-sensitive.

Versioning file system is then what's needed, and that has been in VMS/VAX-VMS/OpenVMS since seventies (and since seventies, VAX had 128 bit integers as well). There's no good reason mainstream OS don't have it (like Windows, Linux and OS X), it's absent only due to inertia. In linux there's NILFS but it's not used in mainstream distributions. DB is partial solution, as files belong to the file system, not the database.