Remove necessity for symbolic links.

[TravisWhitaker]

Symbolic links can cause lots of problems. Here are some of them.

• Build systems can't easily detect when a file has changed.
• Working with the directory structure is less intuitive and extremely annoying.
• Symbolic links don't work the same way on each file system (wonky stuff will happen with NTFS).
• Flipper's source tree is nowhere near complex enough to require a management script; much more complex source trees get along just fine without such a mechanism.

The use of symbolic links is necessitated by the current build system. I'm working on a new build system that does not require any symbolic links.

[georgemorgan]

Symbolic linking allows certain aspects of the build system to be abstracted. Flipper's build system used to not have symbolic links and was very difficult to navigate. I would advise keeping them, but I'm open to suggestions as to how the build system could be improved. The management script is not strictly necessary, it is simply a tool that makes it easy to stage new modules and drivers into the build system, something the console will eventually take over.

[TravisWhitaker]

Symbolic linking allows certain aspects of the build system to be abstracted.

Can you be more specific? Specifically, which (if any) abstractions do you feel are best served by symbolic links? I'm especially curious given the limited machinery for defining abstractions provided by make.

The management script is not strictly necessary, it is simply a tool that makes it easy to stage new modules and drivers into the build system, something the console will eventually take over.

It would be nice if no tool was required to stage new modules and drivers.

[georgemorgan]

We've had many thorough discussions regarding the benefits of the new build system. The new organization makes it much easier to work on a single module at a time due to the fact that all of the files corresponding to that module are localized.

It's much nicer to have a tool create applications, modules, and drivers for you from a given template than manually constructing all of the files. It also ensures consistency.

[TravisWhitaker]

The new organization makes it much easier to work on a single module at a time due to the fact that all of the files corresponding to that module are localized.

This is achievable without symbolic links.

It's much nicer to have a tool create applications, modules, and drivers for you from a given template than manually constructing all of the files. It also ensures consistency.

It would be nice if it weren't a headache to manually construct applications, modules, and drivers.

[georgemorgan]

Okay, I'm open to see what you can come up with.

And yes, it would be. Symlinks aren't needed for modules or applications, only drivers (they have more than one target).