Deadlock when xmake invokes script which invokes xmake again

[dkaszews]

I am doing integration testing via a python script which calls subprocess.check_output(['xmake', 'run', 'app'] + args) and then parses the output. It works fine, but deadlocks after I tried invoking it from a dummy test target I added so it can be run using xmake test. I believe the reason for this is that xmake uses project.lock at entry, and therefore cannot be called recursively, as is in my case: xmake test -> test.py -> xmake run.

I have worked around this by replacing xmake run app with direct invocation of the executable, finding the active config from .xmake/*/*/xmake.conf (because xmake config -v would deadlock again). Alternative solution was to glob build/*/*/*/app and find newest file, but it did not work as newest does not necessarily mean active (building debug, then release, then debug again will have newest release, because debug did not touch executable if no sources changed).

Is there a better way to resolve this? What I am really trying to do is resolve app to build/$plat/$arch/$mode/app, but seem to be unable to invoke xmake to help me.

[dkaszews]

I seem to have duck-debugged my way onto a decent solution:

function copy_latest(target)
    destination = 'build/latest/'
    os.mkdir(destination)
    os.cp(target:targetfile(), destination)
end

target('app')
    ...
    after_build(copy_latest)

This way instead of resolving build/$plat/$arch/$mode/app I can just run build/latest/app. Also handy when manually running from command line.