Hi,

I have just submitted some of my changes into the public depot at //guest/jan_mikkelsen/jam/src/...

At this point, there are two additions:

- The way strings are expanded in actions has been extended. Temporary files can be created from expressions, allowing long lists of file names (for example) to compilers or for configuration files for build tools (eg: manifest files for Java jars) to be created by Jam on the fly.

- A :C modifier has been added to allow a package name to be extracted from a file based on the PACKAGESCAN variable.

I've used these changes to compile reasonably sized Java projects to good effect. Using temporary files to batch large numbers of source files into a single compiler run gives a significant win with Java compilers vs one invocation per source file. Automatic classpath management and manifest generation also helps a lot.

The Jambase that drives this for Java builds is slightly customised. I'm generalising it at the moment, and I will try to get it submitted quickly.

I'm interested to know whether this is useful and whether improvements can be made.

Regards,