AMDG
On 10/19/2017 10:34 PM, Stefan Seefeld via Boost-build wrote:
I have been following your advice and tried to merge the "make0()" function call
to compute a target's fate into the state machine implemented in make1.c, to
support a more dynamic build process. In general this is working great (i.e. I
can now freely mix config-like targets that compute parameters that are later
used in the build, with other targets). However, there is one set of use-cases
that's still causing me some headache: actions that update more than one target,
i.e. that require other targets to be "rebuilt".
While I understand the situation (as well as the implementation with
"force_rebuilds()") well, I'm still struggling with some of the code:
Why is the loop in
https://github.com/boostorg/build/blob/develop/src/engine/make1.c#L1220-L1227
launching all the targets that are to be updated by the current command, and
then letting that command wait for them to be ready ? (I see the corresponding
"unlock" code is
https://github.com/boostorg/build/blob/develop/src/engine/make1.c#L939-L948, but
I don't quite understand that part of the workflow.)
It's basically dealing with the fact that there
isn't a one-to-one correspondence between targets
and actions. What we need to schedule is the actions,
but the dependencies are expressed in terms of targets.
The rule is that an action can be started when all
the dependencies of all the targets it creates are
up-to-date.
The code in question was introduced in this commit:
https://github.com/boostorg/build/commit/c1395b49614ed5c4b0958355ffaa0f794fb760a2
which replaces an older implementation which used INCLUDES.
(I don't remember the details of why INCLUDES caused
problems off the top of my head.)
Also, keep in mind that these were fixes that were
put in much later than the original code. The
original Perforce Jam mishandled actions
that produced multiple targets quite badly.
The mismatch between dependencies/targets/actions
is quite annoying to deal with, and the fix
to make it work is a bit of a kludge.