Re: [bug #51495] Notice when a rule changed, so target needs rebuilding

[Kyle Rose]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 4:00 PM, Edward Welbourne <address@hidden> wrote:

Henrik Carlqvist (18 July 2017 15:46)
> The quick and easy way to accomplish this today is of course to also
> add the Makefile to the prerequisites of targets. If you don't want
> every target to be rebuilt when only one rule has changed it is also
> possible to split the Makefile up into several files with only one
> rule in each file.

well, rules also depend on variables they evaluate (LDFLAGS, etc.), so
you need to modularise the variable-setting and make all targets whose
rule exercises a variable also depend on the file in which that
variable's value gets set.  Even that doesn't save you when I pass some
variable-override on make's command-line.

OTOH, hashing the whole command-line may be over-kill; if I change some
tool's verbosity, that shouldn't change the generated file, so shouldn't
force a rebuild.

 

This depends entirely on the semantics of the command in question. There's no reasonable way for make to know what is semantically relevant and what isn't.

I agree with the general idea expressed in the top of the thread, but by contrast think it *should* be by comparing generated recipes. Anything other than syntactic changes can be optimized by mechanisms like ccache.

Kyle