On 04/13/2010 04:46 PM, Vladimir Prus wrote:

On Sunday 11 April 2010 21:36:37 Ray Lambert wrote:

A few weeks ago I posted an inquiry regarding the detection of 
dependency changes during a build, which included a test case that 
demonstrates the issue.  Here's my original post: 
<http://lists.boost.org/boost-build/2010/03/23253.php>

Ray,

the caching of timestamp at a random moment during build process is expected.
I don't know what effect such caching has on run-time performance, compared
to calling 'stat' on files as necessary, and this is a code we've inherited
from Perforce Jam. I don't have any high-level reason why this behaviour
should be like that, but probably don't have the time to experiment with
removing it right now either.

Hope this at least clarifies the situation.

Hi Vladimir,

Thanks for your response.

I'd like to clarify what I meant by caching time stamps.

I don't know much about the BB internals but I envision at least two major phases: the parsing phase (when Jamfiles are read and tables are built) and the building phase.

I've observed that the SHELL command executes before anything gets built. So it appears that it is executed either during the parsing phase or during some intermediate phase between parsing and building.

This suggests that the SHELL command might be useful for running an external tool that might modify some dependencies before the actual build starts. This should work if time stamps are read during the building phase. However, this does not appear to be the case (as my test case demonstrates).

My hope would be that BB could be made to delay the reading of time stamps until the latest moment possible, or at least until the build phase. This would allow the SHELL command (or something similar) to launch external tools before the build and to have their effects noticed by BB.

As it is right now, the only way to run any tools like this prior to the build is to use a build script and invoke bjam from it. It would be much better (IMO) if one could invoke those sorts of things directly from BB.

Here are some examples from my experience:

1) I have a tool that retrieves the current source control revision number and updates a header file if it has changed so that it can be compiled into my app. The app needs to rebuild when the header file is updated, of course. I would also like to be able to rebuild this tool prior to running it, if its out of date.

2) I have a tool that reads a schema definition and generates a .cpp file and a .h file if they're out of date. The .cpp file needs to be compiled into a static lib and the .h file needs to trigger other files in the project to rebuild. As with (1), I would also like to be able to rebuild this tool prior to running it, if its out of date.

I have not been able to get these to work with BB but they are easy to do with make or with most GUI-based build systems. I've tried many ways to make these work but I am either stymied by BB reading the time stamps too early (as discussed above) or being unable to ensure the correct order of operations or getting different results when I invoke the build from different directories. (Unfortunately, I probably can't recall all the details of what I tried because it has been a while since I last played around with this. But I know that I've tried the 'make', 'nofile', 'generate' and custom rules and SHELL has come the closest to working.)

Again, I understand that BB has a lot of inherited code and that it may not be practical or possible to make it work the way I suggest. But I just want to be sure that I've described the issue adequately.

(Other than these issues, BTW, I love BB!)

Thanks again for your help,

~ray