A common idiom in CMake-based build systems is to have custom commands
that generate files not listed explicitly as outputs so that these
files do not have to be newer than the inputs. The file modification
times of such "byproducts" are updated only when their content changes.
Then other build rules can depend on the byproducts explicitly so that
their dependents rebuild when the content of the original byproducts
really does change.
This "undeclared byproduct" approach is necessary for Makefile, VS, and
Xcode build tools because if a byproduct were listed as an output of a
rule then the rule would always rerun when the input is newer than the
byproduct but the byproduct may never be updated.
Ninja solves this problem by offering a 'restat' feature to check
whether an output was really modified after running a rule and tracking
the fact that it is up to date separately from its timestamp. However,
Ninja also stats all dependencies up front and will only restat files
that are listed as outputs of rules with the 'restat' option enabled.
Therefore an undeclared byproduct that does not exist at the start of
the build will be considered missing and the build will fail even if
other dependencies would cause the byproduct to be available before its
dependents build.
CMake works around this limitation by adding 'phony' build rules for
custom command dependencies in the build tree that do not have any
explicit specification of what produces them. This is not optimal
because it prevents Ninja from reporting an error when an input to a
rule really is missing. A better approach is to allow projects to
explicitly specify the byproducts of their custom commands so that no
phony rules are needed for them. In order to work with the non-Ninja
generators, the byproducts must be known separately from the outputs.
Add a new "BYPRODUCTS" option to the add_custom_command and
add_custom_target commands to specify byproducts explicitly. Teach the
Ninja generator to specify byproducts as outputs of the custom commands.
In the case of POST_BUILD, PRE_LINK, and PRE_BUILD events on targets
that link, the byproducts must be specified as outputs of the link rule
that runs the commands. Activate 'restat' for such rules so that Ninja
knows it needs to check the byproducts, but not for link rules that have
no byproducts.
Disallow the use of config-specific source files with
the Visual Studio and Xcode generators. They don't have
any way to represent the condition currently.
Use the same common-config API in cmQtAutoGenerators. While
it accepts config-specific files, it doesn't have to support
multiple configurations yet.
Loop over the configs in cmTargetTraceDependencies
and cmGlobalGenerator::WriteSummary and consume all source
files.
Loop over the configs in cmComputeTargetDepends and compute the
object library dependencies for each config.
Until now the cmCustomCommandGenerator was used only to compute the
command lines of a custom command. Generalize it to get the comment,
working directory, dependencies, and outputs of custom commands. Update
use in all generators to support this.
Just enough to reach the BuildMacContentDirectory method and the
NeedRelinkBeforeInstall methods.
In the future, those methods can be moved to cmGeneratorTarget.
To properly track the usage of dependencies that are generated at
compile time as the side effect of other build steps we need
to make the WriteBuild and WritePhonyBuild commands non static
Stephen Kelly
Brad King
Peter Collingbourne
Robert Maynard