isolating builds within a module

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 12 November 2008, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 November 2008, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > hi all..
> >
> > one regret i'm having with regards to putting libplasma in kdelibs is
> > that now building it takes forever as cmake checks each and every lib in
> > kdelibs before building.
> >
> > this hand holding wastes signficant amounts of time for those of us
> > working
>
> The time is not "wasted"...

it absolutely is wasted. i spent 90+% of my build time yesterday waiting for 
checks on non-libplasma. not one of those checks resulted in any building of 
any other code that was being checked ..... because they weren't changed! 

in other words, nothing happened as a result of those checks, and yet i 
waited. and waited. and waited. and waited.

that is the _definition_ of wasting my time: lost for no actual gain.

i get it that this makes it nicer for people not developing/working on the 
software and just building it: they do build relatively rarely (maaybe once a 
day, probably once a week or so or even less), build entire modules (so the 
checks are needed anyways) and don't know enough about the dependencies to 
know to check everything.

but i also understand that it completely SUCKS for people working on 
libplasma. how the hell am i supposed to encourage people to hack on it if it 
means they spend 90% of their time waiting on the toolchain?

for casual developers, that's a huge issue. and i guard with jealousy the low 
barrier to entry to plasma hacking; it's part of how i am able to successfully 
encourage so many people to work on it.

thankfully there is the /fast trick which i've just learned about (thank you 
to everyone who replied to the thread!), but that's one more bit of knowledge 
i'm going to have to pass on to every contributor, and not know how many 
people i lose due to that inneficiency.

unless those checks could be made an order of magnitude faster (in which case 
it wouldn't mater), is there any way to tell cmake "always build this 
component with /fast?" when i run cmake for the first time? then it becomes a 
one time thing i can pass on to people looking to hack on libplasma.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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