Subject: Re: [PATCH v4] meson: regenerate config-list.h when Documentation changes

From: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:20:24 +0000

On 16/02/2026 22:28, D. Ben Knoble wrote:
> The Meson-based build doesn't know when to rebuild config-list.h, so the
> header is sometimes stale.
> 
> For example, an old build directory might have config-list.h from before
> 4173df5187 (submodule: introduce extensions.submodulePathConfig,
> 2026-01-12), which added submodule.<name>.gitdir to the list. Without
> it, t9902-completion.sh fails. Regenerating the config-list.h artifact
> from sources fixes the artifact and the test.
> 
> Teach the meson build to depend on the Documentation files that
> generate-configlist.sh reads by having it an additional output as a list
> of dependency files, since Meson does not have (or want) builtin support
> for globbing like Make. We assume that if a user adds a new file under
> Documentation/config then they will also edit one of the existing files
> to include that new file, and that will trigger a rebuild.
> 
> Also mark the generator script as a dependency.
> 
> Combining the following commands helps debug dependencies:
> 
>      ninja -C <builddir> -t deps config-list.h
>      ninja -C <builddir> -t browse config-list.h
> 
> The former lists all the dependencies discovered from our output ".d"
> file (the config documentation) and the latter shows the dependency on
> the script itself, among other useful edges in the dependency graph.
> 
> Helped-by: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
> Helped-by: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
> Signed-off-by: D. Ben Knoble <[email-masked]>

Thanks for the nicely written commit message.

> +if test -n "$DEPFILE"
> +then
> +	for doc in "$SOURCE_DIR"/Documentation/*config.adoc \
> +		"$SOURCE_DIR"/Documentation/config/*.adoc
> +	do
> +		printf "$OUTPUT: %s\n" "$(printf '%s\n' "$doc" | sed 's/[# ]/\\&/g')"\\

This forks two processes for every file which is a bit inefficient and 
will be especially slow on windows. If we quote $OUTPUT first we should 
be able to use a single sed process for all the files

	QUOTED_OUTPUT="$(printf '%s\n' "$OUTPUT"| sed 's|[/\]|\\&|g')"
	printf '%s\n' "$SOURCE_DIR"/Documentation/*config.adoc \
		"$SOURCE_DIR"/Documentation/config/*.adoc |
	sed -e 's/[# ]/\\&/g' -e "s/^/$QUOTED_OUTPUT: /" >"$DEPFILE"

Thanks

Phillip