[Monodevelop-devel] Adding project build dependencies in MD's makefiles

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Lluis Sanchez Gual <lluis at novell.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I've discussed with Mike (Kestner) a couple of times about the need for
> proper dependency checks between the MD makefiles. That is, a change in
> one of the MD projects would cause all dependent projects to be
> rebuilt.
>
> I'm reluctant to do this change because any small change (even if not
> breaking change) in one of the core MD assemblies would cause the
> rebuild of all the 50 assemblies of MD, and that would be really
> annoying for those who work daily on those assemblies.

Actually, a full build is surprisingly fast these days. Also, you can
work around this problem by cd'ing into the directory of the changed
addin before issuing the "make" command.

> However Mike is right in that with proper dependency checking the
> makefiles would be more correct and would avoid weird build errors when
> there are changes in the api.

I think this would be a really good idea, as we've had a number of
breakages resulting from the lack of proper dependencies. I've
actually added dependencies to a couple of addins already.

> So I'd like to know what you think about this. I suggested making this
> project dependency optional, although I don't know how hard it would be.

I don't think it's necessary. Maybe we could make it more convenient
by having make targets corresponding to the core areas e.g. make
md-project-gui would execute make in
main/src/core/MonoDevelop.Project.Gui.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com