Shorter build times

[David Jarvie]

On Wednesday 28 March 2007 9:49, Krzysztof Lichota wrote:
> Which reminds me of another trick I used at work when building large
> projects. By default build system compiles files in order specified in
> Makefile/other control file. If I was working on one header and one
> source file and there were other files dependent on this header, build
> system rebuilt them in this static order until it got to source file
> corresponding to header file, while often if there was an error, I would
> change header again and go through rebuilding all these files again. So
> I changed list of compiled files to be autogenerated in order of
> modification time, so that file I am working on is compiled first. This
> saved me a lot of time :)

When using enable-final builds, sometimes the order of compilation
matters. In kalarm for example, if certain files aren't early in the
compilation order the build fails. (Perhaps with enough effort these
errors could be fixed so that the order doesn't matter, but changing the
compilation order is a much quicker and perfectly workable fix.) So it
would be necessary to allow a fixed compilation order to be specified for
enable-final builds.

Otherwise, I like your idea of an auto-generated compilation order - it
would certainly save time. :)

-- 
David Jarvie.
KAlarm author & maintainer.
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm