Re: dependency scanner

From:

"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sun, 11 May 2008 21:41:37 -0700

Message-ID:

<LTPVj.3493$nl7.283@flpi146.ffdc.sbc.com>

Lew wrote:

Mike Schilling wrote:

jolz wrote:

I am looking for a class/program that will scan a .java file for
imports (recursively) to discover which ones need to be rebuilt.
This is close to GNU's makedepend or cook's c_incl.

You didn't consider import x.y.* and classes in the same package.

And the use of fully qualified named with no import.

Given that 'import' is just syntactic sugar for FQNs, any dependency
analysis tool would only use FQNs for its analysis, I should think.

Certainly. But the OP was suggesting a tool that scanned the .java
file lexically for imports, and that would fail to find

p1.p2.p3.class1 c = null;

Personally, I'd build a dependency tool that scanned the .class file,
not the .java file. (If there is no .class file, you don't need to
know anything about dependencies to realize that the .java file needs
to be recompiled.) The bytecode has everything you need, and there is
lots of open-source code out there to help you parse it.