{"id":139,"date":"2006-11-22T17:51:41","date_gmt":"2006-11-22T21:51:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2006-11-22\/depths-of-the-mozilla-build-system\/"},"modified":"2006-11-22T17:51:41","modified_gmt":"2006-11-22T21:51:41","slug":"depths-of-the-mozilla-build-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2006-11-22\/depths-of-the-mozilla-build-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Depths of the Mozilla Build System"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should really be posting about some important plans for the Mozilla build system that I nailed down during the Firefox summit. But I don’t have time to give that a proper post, so instead I’m going to discuss one of the amazing things I’ve learned about the Mozilla build system over the past few days. Look at this snippet from rules.mk<\/a>. I’ve been the nominal owner of this code for almost two years, but didn’t really understand it until this week. This little piece of code is one of the things that makes our build system really great and horrible at the same time:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Whenever people remove or alter the location of header files, this code keeps all the depend builds from going red.\n
  2. It causes us to call stat() an extra 10,000+ times per depend build. Probably a lot more than that, actually, but I didn’t instrument it.\n<\/ol>\n

    We do an end-run around the normal dependency checks done by GNU make: the mddepend.pl<\/a> script stats and calculates the compiler-generated dependencies in advance. If the dependency is missing or new, it adds a FORCE dependency on the object file. Unfortunately, we do this calculation on each build pass: once for export<\/tt>, once for libs<\/tt>, once for tools<\/tt>, and perhaps another time for check<\/tt>. This causes us to check dependencies many many more times than we actually need to.<\/p>\n

    What we really want to implement is an “optional dependency”: a directive that if a header has been updated, we should rebuild the object; but if the header doesn’t exist any more, we shouldn’t try to build it (because we don’t have any rules to generate such headers which were removed or relocated intentionally). This is probably not something I’m going to fix any time soon. But I may find time to write it up in detail to propose it as a feature for gmake 3.82.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I should really be posting about some important plans for the Mozilla build system that I nailed down during the Firefox summit. But I don’t have time to give that a proper post, so instead I’m going to discuss one of the amazing things I’ve learned about the Mozilla build system over the past few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mozilla","tag-build-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}