Dep Software Build Automation Tool

Release Notes

Dep 0.6

Dep 0.6 was released on 19 October 2025. Changes are:

• Added reparse/rescan to pattern expansion and fixed includes/pattern interation
• Stopped running queued jobs after a failure
• Improved -v verbosity settings and added more
• Sped up by removing slow and unnecessary calculateIncludeModTime loop
• Removed buggy and unnecessary FOLDERLIST_ALL logic
• Removed unused parameters and variables
• Changed --noskip to --link
• Fixed --mkdir --link interaction edge case
• File format changes: - Broke fileinfo cache lines over a block of several optional lines - Added rebuiltsametime cache lines - Build rules starting with %pseudo or similar no longer require braces - If a build rule has braces, the opening brace must be on the first line of the rule (this is to prevent a grammar ambiguity) - Changed if statement from if-{-} style to if-then-end style
• Added rebuiltSameTime logic to track non-changing file writes over multiple invocations
• Ignored filesize of directories
• Changed default settings from fast+confusing to slow+reliable
• Changed --noskip to its opposite fast
• Ignored failing mkdir commands
• Opened files properly before looking in them for includes
• Removed wonky advice in diagnostics
• added --readcache option
• added --nomkdir option
• added LINE special variable
• Changed "imm echo" to "print"
• TLDR: Fixed design flaws, fixed usability flaws, debugged, added new stuff, fixed performance flaws

Dep 0.51

Dep 0.51 was released on 20 December 2024. Changes are:

• Fixed bugs in pattern rule construction affecting folders and precompiled headers
• Stopped constructing so many temporary patterns
• Updated Dep's own DepFile
• Fixed --ruleincludes by not reading includes from cache (when not using --treeincludes)
• Fixed --ruleincludes / pattern interaction bug by re-running the parser on expanded patterns

Dep 0.5

Dep 0.5 was released on 12 October 2024. Changes are:

• Improvements to build ordering via whichComesFirst
• Cached getFileState
• Added timestampsize
• Added implementsHeader
• Cached getCompletionSeconds
• Refactored shared memory
• Runs recently-failed steps until 15% through the job, then switches to critical-path steps
• When looking for the finished job, stopped looking through old jobs
• Improved pattern matching of #include statements
• Stopped looking for #include statements when the cached copy is OK
• Debug senseModTime/senseSize/senseRule/FILEFLAG\_STAT\_CHANGED
• Get the updated mod time before writing it back to cache
• Fixed 'file exists' errors on mkdir commands
• Gradually scaled up from number of processors (e.g. 8) number of register sets (e.g. 16)
• Fixed bug that sometimes reset the number of pipelines
• Fixed bug that sometimes let there be more pipelines than register sets
• Fixed syntax lookup of commands starting with "-":w
• Added new acceptance test in Gossammer Markup Language
• Added exists\_file\_ext mechanism that marks all .so/.dll rules at %exists
• Added mechanism that marks all mkdir rules at %exists
• Added --noskip option that runs all %exists rules
• Added mechanism that automatically finds all mkdir dependencies
• Changed %exist to %exists
• Added %alias for precompiled headers
• Added --noreadcache, --nowritecache and --writecache
• Debugged pipeline commands
• Refactored verbosity options and output
• Added --tracefile option
• Stopped making duplicate stat() calls
• Debugged marking of re-generated files
• Debugged reading of #include files from .c files
• Added % patterns
• Shrank some struct sizes
• Fixed memory leaks
• Refactored parser buffer creation+deletion
• Changed --simplesort to --fixedorder
• Refactored nextCommand to remove startMore option
• The set of --treeincludes include files now depends on the list of -I options

Dep 0.4

Dep 0.4 was released on 30 May 2023. Changes are:

• Added filename and line number to duplicate rule warning messages
• Fixed bug that caused non-duplicate rules to be listed as warnings
• Separated environment variable spaces for parallel execution streams
• Fixed bug that wrote duplicate rules to .DepFileCache
• Fixed bug in determining locations of included source files
• Fixed bug in normalizing file path names

Dep 0.3

Dep 0.3 was released on 9 March 2023. Changes are:

• Changed findIncludes mechanism to look at filenames instead of options such as -c, to handle instances such as gcc a.c b.o
• Fixed bugs in quote mark parsing
• Combined operations on rule and tree includes

Dep 0.2

Dep 0.2 was released on 16 February 2023. Changes are:

• Added sensing and invalidation of some misbuilt files (generally 0 byte files, but 8 bytes for .a files)
• Added %outz for files that may validly be zero length
• Fixed bugs in handling of rules with no inputs e.g. mkdir commands
• Added existence dependencies
• Changed -p option to -j
• No need to put " > %out " in syntax lines any more, it is now always assumed
• Fixed bugs in interpretation of nested for loops
• Allowed braces on subsequent lines of for loops
• Changed "if ... endif" to "if { }"
• Fixed some errors in the generation of .DepFileCache and suppressed some others in readback
• Improved line and column number reporting in DepFile syntax error messages
• Added /etc/depsyntax file, which includes syntaxes of common commands
• Fixed bug in export statements within rules: they are now run during execution, not during parsing

Dep 0.1

Dep 0.1 was released on 7 December 2022.

Copyright and Licence

Copyright (C) 2022 Matthew Rickard

Dep is free software licenced under the GNU General Public Licence version 3.