Re: Equivalent of recursive make with meson/ninja?

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 11:54:40AM +0000, Tim-Philipp Müller wrote:
> With meson/ninja, everything will end up in one single build.ninja file
> (the equivalent to a Makefile).
>
> You'd just do
>
>  touch foo.c
>  ninja

In two different terminal tabs though.

> and it will only recompile/relink the bits that have changed, and
> nothing else. It will be very very fast in most cases.

It'll also relink all the tests and rebuild the docs (GTK-Doc is very
slow).

> You can also do:
>
>   touch foo.c
>   ninja -C ../build
>
> if you prefer to be in the source dir.

Too long to type.

> If you haven't got a full build yet and only want to build a single
> target without building more than absolutely needed you can also just
> do
>
>   ninja -C ../build src/libfoobar.so.1.2.3
>
> or somesuch (tab completion for targets should just work if you have
> the right bits installed), but I'd expect that the normal use case is
> that you do a full build and then just rebuild when things change.

Yes I always do a full build first. autogen.sh/configure takes a lot of
time compared to meson, but once the full build is done, I just run make
commands which is fast enough.

> You'll also notice that 'ninja' is near-instantaneous if there are no
> changes, compared to recursive make which can take tens of seconds to
> do nothing in that case. (Just as a data point, why the recursive ninja
> thing is not really needed.)

What I don't like to do is to scroll up the build output to see the
warnings I'm interested in.

--
Sébastien