gnatmake Works ¶Generally gnatmake automatically performs all necessary
recompilations and you don’t need to worry about how it works. However,
it may be useful to have some basic understanding of the gnatmake
approach and in particular to understand how it uses the results of
previous compilations without incorrectly depending on them.
First a definition: an object file is considered `up to date' if the corresponding ALI file exists and if all the source files listed in the dependency section of this ALI file have time stamps matching those in the ALI file. This means that neither the source file itself nor any files that it depends on have been modified, and hence there is no need to recompile this file.
gnatmake works by first checking if the specified main unit is up
to date. If so, no compilations are required for the main unit. If not,
gnatmake compiles the main program to build a new ALI file that
reflects the latest sources. Then the ALI file of the main unit is
examined to find all the source files on which the main program depends,
and gnatmake recursively applies the above procedure on all these
files.
This process ensures that gnatmake only trusts the dependencies
in an existing ALI file if they are known to be correct. Otherwise it
always recompiles to determine a new, guaranteed accurate set of
dependencies. As a result the program is compiled ‘upside down’ from what may
be more familiar as the required order of compilation in some other Ada
systems. In particular, clients are compiled before the units on which
they depend. The ability of GNAT to compile in any order is critical in
allowing an order of compilation to be chosen that guarantees that
gnatmake will recompute a correct set of new dependencies if
necessary.
When invoking gnatmake with several file_names, if a unit is
imported by several of the executables, it will be recompiled at most once.
Note: when using non-standard naming conventions
(Using Other File Names), changing through a configuration pragmas
file the version of a source and invoking gnatmake to recompile may
have no effect, if the previous version of the source is still accessible
by gnatmake. It may be necessary to use the switch
-f.