On Monday, October 19, 2015 at 11:09:46 AM UTC+11, Eric Rescorla wrote: > On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 4:14 PM, Nicholas Nethercote > wrote: > > > On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Eric Rescorla wrote: > > > > > > What's needed here is a dependency management system that > > > simply builds what's needed regardless of what's changed, > > > > Otherwise known as "a proper build system". glandium and co. have been > > working towards that for a long time. It's a big, difficult job. |mach > > build binaries| and |mach build faster| are temporary waypoints along > > the way that approximate "a proper build system" for a couple of > > common workflows. Eventually |mach build| should just do the right > > thing, no matter what files you've touched... > > > > > not more ways for the user to tell the build system "only rebuild some > > stuff". > > > > ... except that bholley and ehsan are asking for a way to override the > > dependency tracking and just rebuild particular directories. > > > I don't want to speak for bholley and ehsan, but when *I* run into this > problem it's because the build system isn't doing the right thing. If it > were, I wouldn't have to. > > -Ekr
I think the situation they're talking about, and which I've experienced myself, is that sneezing at a header file that's included almost everywhere means a very long rebuild time -- which is the right thing for the build system to do of course! But if we've only changed a comment, or added a method, or are just trying to implement/fix a bug and test a patch quickly in isolation, then we should have the ability to locally&temporarily override the build system decisions. There are probably ways around that (e.g. experiment in a cpp file before moving code to a header), but it's sometimes cumbersome or just not worth the effort, compared with rebuilding only parts of the system. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform