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

[Mike Kestner]

On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 20:19 -0500, Michael Hutchinson wrote:

> > 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.

There's potentially a larger issue, in that the MD makefiles are
synchronized by MD itself, so the functionality which does this sync
apparently does not currently support robust dependency checking for its
output.  Regardless of whether the MD project wants to have robust
dependency checking for project references, I suspect many of our users
will want it.

> > 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.

If the feature is optional, I think it should probably be on by default,
because most people will expect a change in a project to rebuild
projects which depend on it.

-- 
Mike Kestner <mkestner at gmail.com>