Relative and absolute paths

[Fredrik Medley]

I cannot find any documentation about how paths should be specified: absolute or relative. The problem och mixing absolute and relative paths is not just in the build.ninja file, but also from the include header parsing in both the gcc and msvc case. Also, specifying a target output as relative in one rule and absolute in another will get through ninja even if the wanted behaviour is to abort.

What should be output from my generator into the build.ninja file, relative or absolute paths?

How to handle source files on other drives in Windows?

Why doesn't ninja just make absolute path for every file path?

The deps files may contain a mixture of relative and absolut paths. How to handle?

The attachment has test cases that show the specific problems.

Best regards,

Fredrik

[Fredrik Medley]

Basically, ninja breaks when specifying absolute paths to generated header files because the compiler (msvc) outputs relative paths to the included header files. Why should my ninja generator contain the knowledge about the format of the compiler dependency output?

I've tried changing all paths to absolute or relative when parsing the manifest files and deps files. If deciding for such solution, don't forget to keep the original path for use in the $in and $out variables.

/Fredrik

[Scott Graham]

Could you provide a repro?

I think gyp generally uses relative paths, but I don't know of any specific problem in normalizing when absolute paths are involved.

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[Fredrik Medley]

I can create a real repository the next week, if that helps. Otherwise, if you run windows/build.bat or linux/build.sh in the attached file, you will see that ninja has to be run twice to build all after updating the header_template.h. Adjust the absolute paths in the ninja files or just put the files in C:\Temp\ninja and /tmp/ninja respectively.

/Fredrik

[Scott Graham]

I think you forgot the attachment (or maybe one of our clients stripped it).

[Fredrik Medley]

There is an attachment in the first message in this thread, called ninja-dir-fail.tar.

[Fredrik Medley]

I've created a branch at GitHub: https://github.com/moroten/ninja/tree/abspath-fail

Just build everything using the standard commands.

python configure.py --bootstrap

./ninja

touch src/util_template.h

./ninja

The first call to ninja should make sure everything has been build. The second call to ninja should update src/util.h followed by a rebuild of all source files of ninja. Instead, ninja thinks everything already is up to date because src/util.h exists and there is no edge to build src/util.h, just an unrelated edge to build abspath(src/util.h).