Gir submodules alternative

[gkoz]

There is a significant drawback to having 'gir' and 'gir-files' submodules in each repo: wasted space and build time when working with several repos at once. It is desirable to find another solution which would retain ease of use (edit Gir.toml, make gir) and similar control over 'gir' and 'gir-files' revisions used to regenerate code.

[gkoz]

A possible alternative.

Use an ignored local-gir directory and a gir.txt with commit hashes. The makefile would know how to

• mkdir local-gir; git clone $GIR_URL local-gir/gir; git clone $GIR_FILES_URL local-gir/gir-files if they're absent but not clobber existing ones
• check out the commits set in gir.txt (basically what git submodule update does)

You could either let make gir do the default thing or symlink local-gir somewhere and it would only check out the necessary commits if asked to (e.g. make reset-gir) or just build run the existing gir it finds.

[EPashkin]

Other alternative: optionally make gir/target symlink to base gir/target, may be ever add make target to do that.

[gkoz]

Something like this can be achieved with cargo config.

workdir
├── gdk
│   └── gir
├── gtk
│   └── gir
├── .cargo
│   └── config
└── target

Put target-dir = "./target" in config to make all crates use the same target directory. Just need to make make aware of where to find the binary somehow, or rewrite it to use cargo run.

[EPashkin]

Hard making all target to same directory IMHO not good idea as modules can have different version of gir.
If you think that gir better be always same then better just add new module with gtk, gdk, ..., gir, gir-files as sub-modules.

[gkoz]

You'll still have to rebuild gir when jumping between crates but none of its dependencies (if the lockfiles don't differ). This can be avoided by getting even more creative and using cargo install to make this independent of where the target directory is and let each crate have its own gir binary:

GIR = gir/target/bin/gir
# ...
$(GIR) : gir/Cargo.toml gir/Cargo.lock gir/build.rs $(shell find gir/src -name '*.rs')
    # This line can be removed once we have `cargo install --force`
    cargo uninstall --root gir/target gir 2&>1 > /dev/null || true
    cargo install --root gir/target --path gir

[EPashkin]

I not understand how cargo install be better.

PS. We need full rebuild gir on update local rustc version (every 6 week).

[gkoz]

I'll probably add a PR to make the install idea easier to understand. As to rustc upgrades the benefit of static linking by default is gir the binary isn't dependent on libstd-blahblah.so, you don't need to rebuild it just because rustc is upgraded.

[EPashkin]

Yes, it static linked, so when we try build gir under new rustc it do full rebuild as std version changed.

[EPashkin]

Last only true if not using make.

[sdroege]

We don't have them per module any more as everything's merged into one.