The storage of a pointer means that the ownership and lifetime are
externally determined, which is harder to reason about. It also imposes
API constraints, requiring APIs to return references to backtraces.
This pointer storage was introduced in commit v3.1.0-rc1~425^2~3 (genex:
remove the need for backtraces, 2014-05-23). As backtraces are now cheap
to copy around, just do that instead.
Re-run if the input file changes or if the output file is removed.
This only works with the Makefile generators currently. The limitation
of the Ninja generator is tracked as issue #15256. The IDE
generators will need larger refactoring as they currently rely on
being able to determine the depends and output files at the start of
generate-time, which is too early for the file(GENERATE) case.
The evaluation files must be known before cmTargetTraceDependencies
attempts to find them, but we must actually generate the files after
cmTargetTraceDependencies, as that can add to target SOURCES. The
limitation is that the generated output name must not depend on the
SOURCES of a target if the generated file is used by that target.
Mark the output files as GENERATED so that trace dependencies does
not expect them to already exist in the filesystem.
Move the invokation of ForceLinkerLanguage in the Generate logic
to after the generated file names are known. ForceLinkerLanguage
tries to determine the sources of a target (in order to determine
an already-known language) and otherwise fails to get information
about the generated file.
Test that the output of file(GENERATE) can be used as a target source
file and that accessing the target SOURCES in the name of the output
file is an error. Accessing the TARGET_OBJECTS would be a similar
error if it was legal to use that generator expression in this
context. That is not currently possible and is a different error
condition, so test the current error output as a reminder to change
the expected output if that becomes possible in the future. Test
that generated rule files resulting from cmTargetTraceDependencies
appear in the SOURCES generated in the output file.
Use the clang RemoveCStrCalls tool to automatically migrate the
code. This was only run on linux, so does not have any positive or
negative effect on other platforms.
The idea is to write to a temp file which contains generator
expressions, and at generate time, evaluate the generator expressions,
and write the result to a file.
Because executables on Windows are limited in the length of command line
it is possible to use, it is common to write command line arguments to a
file instead and specify the file as a source of arguments.
This new FILE(GENERATE) subcommand allows the use of generator
expressions to create such files so that they can be used with
add_custom_command for example.