[Omake] Fixpoint builds

[Luis O'Shea]

Are there any plans to extend omake to handle fixpoint builds (as
described in "OMake: designing a scalable build process"
http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu/papers/omake/fase06-tr.pdf)? As you
mention, one application of this extension to omake is building LaTeX
documents.

Currently LaTeX.om is quite convoluted (and in fact is not fully
general; for example it does not handle packages, such as bibunits,
that create non-standard bibliographies).  However given such an
extension to omake, I think it would be straightforward to deal with
LaTeX in a way that was fully general and simple.

My interest in this stems from how we use this at work (RiskMetrics
Group).  We have a large repository of LaTeX files (as well as some
code).  All our references are centralized in one bib file.  As we
work on the documents we regularly add to the bib file.  This triggers
a rebuild of hundreds of LaTeX documents.  Ideally, it should merely
trigger the re-bibtexing of hundreds of auxs, which is relatively
fast.  (As it happens the full re-latexing causes other problems too.)
 In addition we make use of the bibunits package I mentioned above.  A
fixpoint-omake would naturally deal with this.  (Of course it would
also be possible to beef up LaTeX.om.)

After the above whining I should add that I think omake is an
impressive tool.  It is both an elegant idea, and an amazing
implementation -- thank you!

Luis