[llvm-dev] Ninja behavior that befuddles me

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos via llvm-dev]

I'm a total newbie as far as CMake and Ninja are concerned. How do I force Ninja to build the target .inc files? I'm working on TableGen, so my changes to the executable may indeed change the output files. I want to be sure they did not, in fact, change.

Should I just touch all the .td files?

At 8/11/2020 12:01 PM, Michael Kruse wrote:
>Before replacing a file, tblgen checks whether its content is identical. This keeps the time stamps from being updated without any change being made.
>
>The command in add_custom_command is not made a file dependency. The idea is that the command's input file determines the output file's content, not the algorithm that does it.
>
>See <https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/add_custom_command.html#command:add_custom_command>https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/add_custom_command.html#command:add_custom_command
>
>> Whenever a target is used as a command to execute or is mentioned in a generator expression as a command argument, a target-level dependency will be added automatically so that the mentioned target will be built before any target using this custom command. However this does NOT add a file-level dependency that would cause the custom command to re-run whenever the executable is recompiled. List target names with the DEPENDS option to add such file-level dependencies.
>Â 
>Michael
>
>Am Di., 11. Aug. 2020 um 10:39Â Uhr schrieb Paul C. Anagnostopoulos via llvm-dev <<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>:
>This morning I did a build with Ninja, which mysteriously decided to rebuild the entire system (something about a deps stamp being corrupted). When it was done, I had a new llvm-tblgen.exe, but all the target .inc files were old. Hmm. So I touched one of the TableGen source files and did another build. Again, a new llvm-tblgen.exe but no new .inc files. I do, however, have a new .inc.d file corresponding to each .inc file.
>
>I notice that those .inc.d files do not list llvm-tblgen.exe as a dependency. Is that why the .inc files aren't rebuilt? If so, what is the trick?