Laura,

thanks for that, it is definitely of interest - I can see know why you have seemed so "jam aware" in your previous postings. I would dearly love to see your Jamrules, Sybase specifics notwithstanding. One of the problems that I find with jam are that there are no examples so it is often difficult to know how to approach things. Also there is a lack of generic rules partly, I think, because it is easier to hack things out rather than put in the significant amount of effort that is required for a good rule.

If you don't feel that it is appropriate to post your Jamrules here then I would be happy with personal email - I will sign an NDA if that is what you want/need. If you just can't bear to let them go - hey, no problem either.

Personally, I think that it would be good for us all to pool resources and, where company confidentiality is not an issue, make our jamrules available to everybody in the hope that we can mix and match and come up with some good generic stuff. Maybe I'm being hopelessly optimistic here.

Should anyone want to see my stuff I will be happy to send it by personal email rather than posting to the listserver (until I get permission to do so).

Back to the specifics of your jam stuff, I think the one rule approach has got to be the right way to go. I came up with a Dll rule that I was going to use in a Jamfile and then found that I was going to have to put an "if $(OS)" in the jamfile which is not only inelegant but has got to be wrong. I also believe that it is best to keep the Jamfiles as simple and as concise as possible - they are what most developers are going to have to work with most of the time, after all.

I have a couple (so far) of questions on your stuff (in fact I have a load of questions but they are difficult to articulate):

how do you define whether you want a .so or a .lib for any given library?

Does splitting the build into two rules allow you to build *both* .so and .a?

how do you specify the options for the building of specific components?

The approach using extra fields for the .def is nice (I may steal that!). In fact, it is all nice :-)

Enough for now, I will comment further as and when. Cheers, Wilf

Wilf Coles DAIS Consultant, ICL wilf...@iclosl.com wi...@cix.compulink.co.uk