Software Build Systems: Principles and Experience

Chapter 11. Dependencies

Parts I, “The Basics,” and II, “The Build Tools,” discussed the basic concepts of a build system and then explored a number of common build tools. You also learned about the idea of dependencies, which are fundamentally important in any build system. This chapter digs much deeper into how dependency analysis works, how a build tool constructs a dependency graph, and how it invokes compilation tools in the correct order.

Even though developers in a small software project can afford to rebuild their entire source tree frequently, this is unrealistic with larger projects. If a source tree takes longer than 30 seconds to compile, developers expect incremental compilation to be used. That is, they expect the build system to ...