Re: Equivalent of recursive make with meson/ninja?

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 03:58:54PM +0000, Tim-Philipp Müller wrote:
> 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.

For small to medium-sized projects, I still enable gtk-doc by default.
I've just tested with GtkSourceView, re-building the docs takes 25s.
(btw it's a regression, one year or two years ago gtk-doc didn't have
that performance problem, it's reported on bugzilla).

25s is too much for doing it all the time, that's one reason why I like
recursive make, to re-build only the source code for example.

I prefer to always enable the docs, to fix warnings as soon as they
arrive, and have an empty 'unused' file (yes, for all the projects that
I maintain, there are zero warnings when building the docs).

For big projects like GTK+, building the docs takes several hours on my
machine, and there are anyway too many warnings, with huge 'unused'
files…

--
Sébastien