Re: Why do no targets depend on the Jamfiles?

From: Peter Simons (simons_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-04-05 09:06:10

Zbynek Winkler writes:

> I believe it was me. And I still consider it to be a
> major problem but I was alone and I did not manage to
> convice anybody about it seriousness.

IMHO, having targets depend on Jamfiles isn't the right way
to go. You don't care whether your Jamfile has been touched
or not, what you care about is whether the Jamfile has been
changed so that the new settings require re-compilation. For
example, if you add

<define>TURN_THINGS_INSIDE_OUT

to the list of required defines, then you want sources that
haven't been compiled with that define to be re-compiled,
and source that already had it set during compilation not to
be re-compiled. Having all sources depend on the Jamfile
doesn't accomplish that.

IMHO, the way to go in this case is to define

variant insideout : <define>TURN_THINGS_INSIDE_OUT ;

in your project-root.jam, and then Boost.Build will do
exactly what you need. More or less. ;-)

Peter