strace & build-tools

strace is a utility to monitor system calls. I.e. it can report all files open by a process.

fabricate.py is a build-tool based on strace. The idea is pretty cool. It will execute all commands through strace. Than it can automatically figure out the dependencie and targets by looking at the strace output. So you don't need to explicitly specifying the dependencies and targets.

But these approach has a few problems:

• strace will slow down the execution

(not only because of strace itself but also becaue it will have to parse strace output)

• not always correct. i.e. run('cp', '-r', 'src', 'out')

If you just add a file to the src it can not figure out that a "dependency" was added.

• confuse targets & dependencies

It checks the mode files were open, if open in write mode it is target. The problem is that some programs have their own cache system, so a target might be taken as a dependency.

Where these limitations are a problem or not depends on your use-case...

doit & strace

doit takes a very different approach to dependency handling. All dependencies must be explicitly defined.

doit doesn't support any kind of implicit dependency but it now comes with a strace command that lets you easily check which files are being used.

The idea is that you can use this feature while developing your tasks and make sure you are setting the dependencies correctly.

Example:

def task_o():
    return {'actions': ['cp abc abc2', 'touch xyz']}

$ doit strace -f traceme.py o
.  o
.  strace_report
R /xxx/abc2
R /xxx/abc
W /xxx/abc2
W /xxx/xyz

For more details check the docs.