Re: How do WITH_DEPEND_CLEANUP= and WITH_META_MODE= interact? To get the old WITH_META_MODE= behavior, is WITHOUT_DEPEND_CLEANUP= needed?

Reply: Dag-Erling_Smørgrav : "Re: How do WITH_DEPEND_CLEANUP= and WITH_META_MODE= interact? To get the old WITH_META_MODE= behavior, is WITHOUT_DEPEND_CLEANUP= needed?"
In reply to: Mark Millard : "How do WITH_DEPEND_CLEANUP= and WITH_META_MODE= interact? To get the old WITH_META_MODE= behavior, is WITHOUT_DEPEND_CLEANUP= needed?"
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From: Simon J. Gerraty <sjg_at_juniper.net>
Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:39:00 UTC

Mark Millard <marklmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
> [The 2 related commits did not show up on dev-commits-src-main/2025-December/
> to reply to (in my context anyway). Thus the questions to the list here.]
> 
> How do WITH_DEPEND_CLEANUP= and WITH_META_MODE= interact?

Probably not well.

> Do I need to set
> WITHOUT_DEPEND_CLEANUP= to have META_MODE= work as it used to?

My guess would be yes.
It appears that MK_DEPEND_CLEANUP=yes is an attempt to compensate for
MK_META_MODE=no

With MK_META_MODE=yes, things which are affected by changes to build
options should be rebuilt, so there should no need to clean the whole
tree.

FWIW at work the only time I ever find it necessary to clean a tree (and
usually only the stage tree - think; auto-populated DESTDIR) is when
someone changes the location something (eg a library's headers) gets
staged to.  Without cleaning the stage tree, the build may
pick up stale files.

--sjg