On Fri, 2025-02-21 at 16:53 +0100, Ben Boeckel wrote: > > I think it should be possible to preserve the per-directory entry > > points, now that POSIX make supports "include". > > Does it preserve the "defer actually including until its associated > recipe is up-to-date" behavior? If my memory serves at least…I've > been able to live happily in ninja-land for a long time :) . If by "does it preserve" you mean, is that behavior defined by POSIX then no, it is not. That is still a GNU Make-only feature (I'm not aware of any other implementation of make that does this). Just to be clear, what you say above is not precisely the behavior you get from GNU Make. GNU Make considers every makefile it reads (for any reason including "include") to be a goal and tries to rebuild it first before any other targets are built. If any makefile is rebuilt, then make re-execs itself from scratch and starts over again. This has broadly the same effect you describe above but not exactly; for example, in GNU Make _all_ makefiles are rebuilt using the current dependency graph, before _any_ re-exec happens to acquire a new dependency graph. It's not the case that each time a makefile is built we immediately re-exec before trying the next one. But, I'm not exactly sure what use CMake could make of this facility anyway since CMake files are not makefiles and can't be included...? If you took advantage of other GNU Make facilities you could maybe take advantage; for example you could have a $(shell ...) operation that updated a makefile if a CMakeFile was newer, that would force cmake to be re-run and re-generate all the makefiles. There are also more portable options to run a script at makefile parse time than using $(shell ...), such as the "!=" operator which is now standardized in POSIX. Anyway I'm happy to discuss but I doubt this mailing list is the right place to talk about improvements to CMake :)
