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?
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.
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.
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.
That's the traditional method for forcing something to rebuild.
Note the .td rules actually create the new .inc file "on the side"
and only overwrite the target .inc file itself if the new file
does not compare equal, so you could look at the .inc timestamps
after the build to determine whether any have been updated.
If you're especially worried, you could rename all the .inc files
in the build tree, which will cause all new .inc files to be
created using your modified tablegen; then you can do your own
diffs and verify no changes in the generated files.
This method will of course cause everything that depends on the
.inc files to be rebuilt, so the test build will take much longer,
but it would provide that little extra warm-fuzzy feeling.
--paulr
Hmm. Someone suggested that I rebuild them all and do a diff just precisely to obtain the warm and fuzzies. Since I've copied the original .inc files, it's probably easiest to delete all the built .inc files. That will force a complete rebuild of them.