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MMS dependency files

Recently, I've been asked to retrofit a build dependency system, a source versioning system, and redo the code promotion scripts for a rather large code repository. The obvious choice here is the CMS and MMS tools from the DECset product. I thought I'd start with the dependency stuff, as I can then use it to test the checkout and checkin, rebuilds, and promotion stuff.

The system is a little large (over 1900 standalone executable images) and I sure didn't want to hand code that many MMS files. So my thought was to use the in-built dependency generator in MMS to do a first cut, and then automagically munge the files into their final form.

This unfortunately proved to be unworkable due to a number of factors, not the least being that the code repository uses the same file name extension (that is, the bit after the dot) to represent at least five different files types, each type needing a different action to update the target. So I hand coded a few MMS files, then wrote a program to look for all CALL and COPY statements in the COBOL program tree.

Once the dependencies where detected (and the inevitable special cases dealt with), the code outputs a nicely formatted MMS file based on my hand coded templates, which I'm happy to say built the most complex of the repository's executables on about the second go.

Now to run it for the other 1900+...