Re: Equivalent of recursive make with meson/ninja?

[Tim-Philipp Müller <t i m zen co uk>]

On Sat, 2017-02-11 at 15:56 +0100, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:

> Fwiw, it won't rebuild the docs since that is done at install time,
> not at compile time.
>
> That is a strange thing to do, building something at install time.

Dunno, for me the fact that gtk-doc is so slow is extremely annoying in
 my normal dev workflow, especially when it rebuilds the docs just
because I or someone else touched a source file somewhere (i.e. pretty
much constantly when you git pull from a module that's actively worked
on by many people). For almost all modules I maintain, gtk-doc is
slower by a factor N than the rest of the entire build, so that really
kills productivity. Many devs I know build everything with --disable-
gtk-doc by default for that reason.

As such I found it quite refreshing that meson does not build the docs
by default :)

I'm sure it would be fairly easy to add a kwarg or switch somewhere to
make it build the docs by default though if that's really wanted.


> I often do:
> $ cd docs/
> $ make clean
> $ make
>
> to see if there are any warnings. If it's mixed up with install
> output, it's far less convenient.

There's a target to just build the docs without installing them, so you
can just do 

  ninja foobar-doc

(with optional -C builddir).

I have no solution for your vi file-from-srcdir file-from-builddir
conundrum, but me I don't do that often enough to really care :)

Cheers
-Tim