Re: solution to depend on cached set of variable values

[Kaz Kylheku (gmake)]

On 2021-04-11 11:38, Britton Kerin wrote:
> I've got vars like DEBUG_ENABLE only a big hairy pile of them at this
> point, and I want make to rebuild everything when I give a different
> set of them (including via command line) with my having
> to remember to do clean first.
>
> I can see how it might be done using .VARIABLES and a cache of some
> sort but I wonder if anyone has already done this?

In the past I implemented a scheme whereby the relevant variables
were serialized into a big string which was stored in a file.

Files dependent on those variables were made dependent on that file
as a prerequisite.

On every invocation, the build system would generate this string
and compare it to the existing contents of the file. If they matched,
it would avoid touching the file, thus avoid modifying its time stamp.