Bo Peng wrote: >> I am not sure if autotools can detect >> such changes and do a rebuild automatically. >> >> It can. > > How? I only see boost directory is included, no other special > treatment. Do you mean make tracks boost dependency in each local .dep > folder, does it check time stamps of /usr/include?
Yes and yes (at least on my box). After all, there must be a reason why it is so slow ;-( Actually I am not sure whether the stamps of the files in /usr/include are really checked, or if they are excluded by some magic, but these files appear in .dep/*.Po. System headers do not need to be included in the dependency tree IMHO, since they are usually only changed if you do an upgrade, and a full recompile is in order in that case anyway. > This article also points out many more problems of autotools, and I am > not at a level of proficiency to judge them. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that autotools are perfect. In fact they have many problems, therefore I don't use them for my own projects. Even if my claim is wrong (I have no reason to believe that, but I don't have a proof for the claim either) I still demand from a build system that it handles all internal dependencies in "developer mode" > My understanding was that boost is close to system include files and > will not be touched often. After all, if we tweak local boost files, > what if users use system boost headers? Then the local boost copy is irrelevant and should not cause any rebuild. You are right that boost is not touched very often, but I don't want to think about that, I want the build system to do that for me. Adding 20 seconds to every build is far better than spending two hours to debug a non-existing bug! Georg
