pptable is a cool tool indeed, but I think it shouldn’t halt the build process, should it?
Couldn’t it be called from the Makefile.xt with some additional flag.
Upon a diff in the table, only a warning is issued, and the newly generated .pp is saved as ModName.pp.autogen or so.
The build process continues, and it is left up to the developer to fix his outdated pp or not. Now I manually have to remove my pp file each time the sdf has changed, before running make.

Submitted on 22 March 2004 at 10:31

STR-30, mdejonge:
Hi Arthur,

I don’t agree. The problem is that if pptable-diff encounters an inconsistency, then the pretty-print table that gets installed is incorrect. This means that pretty-printing with this table might fail. Consequently, other tools may break because of such errenous tables.

I think therefore that it is good that the build process fails when an inconsistent pretty-print table is encountered. Otherwise, other tools might fail to work unexpectedly. So, if you develop a language and you indicate that you also want to install a pretty-print table, than you must develop the language and pretty-print table in parallel.

Best regards,
Merijn

STR-30, adam:
Hmm, possibly. I’m currently using a separate ModName-pretty.pp that I manually keep up to date with ModName.pp, so during SDF-work I don’t care about ModName.pp being outdated or not.
But maybe my case is too specific to request a change in pp build policy.

STR-30, martin:
The idea is that there is no longer a need to have a separate pretty print table (usually named -pretty.pp).