Module Action

source code

SCons.Action

This encapsulates information about executing any sort of action that can build one or more target Nodes (typically files) from one or more source Nodes (also typically files) given a specific Environment.

The base class here is ActionBase. The base class supplies just a few OO utility methods and some generic methods for displaying information about an Action in response to the various commands that control printing.

A second-level base class is _ActionAction. This extends ActionBase by providing the methods that can be used to show and perform an action. True Action objects will subclass _ActionAction; Action factory class objects will subclass ActionBase.

The heavy lifting is handled by subclasses for the different types of actions we might execute:

CommandAction CommandGeneratorAction FunctionAction ListAction

The subclasses supply the following public interface methods used by other modules:

__call__()

THE public interface, "calling" an Action object executes the command or Python function. This also takes care of printing a pre-substitution command for debugging purposes.

get_contents()

Fetches the "contents" of an Action for signature calculation plus the varlist. This is what gets MD5 checksummed to decide if a target needs to be rebuilt because its action changed.

genstring()

Returns a string representation of the Action without command substitution, but allows a CommandGeneratorAction to generate the right action based on the specified target, source and env. This is used by the Signature subsystem (through the Executor) to obtain an (imprecise) representation of the Action operation for informative purposes.

Subclasses also supply the following methods for internal use within this module:

__str__()

Returns a string approximation of the Action; no variable substitution is performed.

execute()

The internal method that really, truly, actually handles the execution of a command or Python function. This is used so that the __call__() methods can take care of displaying any pre-substitution representations, and then execute an action without worrying about the specific Actions involved.

get_presig()

Fetches the "contents" of a subclass for signature calculation. The varlist is added to this to produce the Action's contents.

strfunction()

Returns a substituted string representation of the Action. This is used by the _ActionAction.show() command to display the command/function that will be executed to generate the target(s).

There is a related independent ActionCaller class that looks like a regular Action, and which serves as a wrapper for arbitrary functions that we want to let the user specify the arguments to now, but actually execute later (when an out-of-date check determines that it's needed to be executed, for example). Objects of this class are returned by an ActionFactory class that provides a __call__() method as a convenient way for wrapping up the functions.