On 2015-10-19 4:28 AM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 8:37 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbar...@mit.edu> wrote:
Eventually |mach build| should just do the right
thing, no matter what files you've touched...
The problem is that definitions of "right thing" differ depending on the
goal, right?
I'm using the standard build system sense of "right thing" where all
dependencies are known and correct and the build system conservatively
rebuilds things based on modification timestamps and at file
granularity. Which we currently don't have but which glandium and co.
are steadily working towards.
That is totally the "wrong thing" if a human knows better than the build
system what actually changed beyond timestamps on a bunch of source
files, which is the case under discussion here.
This is good enough 99% of the time but then there's the 1% cases such
as the one bholley is discussing. And those cases are valid; we just
want them to be as simple as possible while still being useful so they
don't get in the way of other improvements. AIUI glandium started this
thread because dumbmake is exactly a system for those 1% cases that is
*not* all that simple and *is* getting in the way of other
improvements.
Hmm, unless I missed it nobody here mentioned that dumbmake is getting
in the way of improving the build system in any specific way. If that
is indeed the case, let's remove it. If not, my take is that changing
things here breaks the muscle memory of the few people who use it today
and really doesn't improve anything much in the grand scheme of things,
so I'm mostly ambivalent with a bit of a tendency towards not changing
anything. But I can also live with the change if it means issues more
./mach build toolkit/library commands by hands; that would be by far one
of the less annoying things about our build system!
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