Generators that depend on multiple files

[WarrenWeckesser]

I'm using generators to process Jinja templates into source code, e.g. foo.c.jinja is transformed to foo.c. This works great, but as my Jinja files get more complicated, I find it useful to share common Jinja statements in a file that is included by other Jinja files. That is, foo.c.jinja has the line {% include "common.jinja" %}, where common.jinja contains Jinja definitions. I need a way to tell meson that foo.c also depends on common.jinja, but I don't see how to do this with a generator. Is this possible, or should I switch to using custom targets? C.f. mesonbuild/meson#6064

[rgommers]

I need a way to tell meson that foo.c also depends on common.jinja, but I don't see how to do this with a generator. Is this possible

Hey Warren, I think it may be possible with the depends keyword of generator. See for example linalg_init_cython_gen in scipy/linalg/meson.build. All Cython generators in SciPy depend also on __init__.py and .pxd files.

[WarrenWeckesser]

Thanks Ralf. I had seen the depends keyword, but my naive attempt to use it with just the filename resulted in an error--a simple filename is not a build target. It works if I use the "copyfile" trick as done in the SciPy code that you pointed out, i.e.:

fs = import('fs')

common_jinja = fs.copyfile('common.jinja')

jinja = generator(<...>,
                  depends : [common_jinja])