So far we've seen how &SCons; handles one-time builds.
But one of the main functions of a build tool like &SCons;
is to rebuild only the necessary things
when source files change--or, put another way,
&SCons; should not
waste time rebuilding things that have already been built.
You can see this at work simply by re-invoking &SCons;
after building our simple &hello; example:
% scons -Q
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q
scons: `.' is up to date.
The second time it is executed,
&SCons; realizes that the &hello; program
is up-to-date with respect to the current &hello_c; source file,
and avoids rebuilding it.
You can see this more clearly by naming
the &hello; program explicitly on the command line:
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
Note that &SCons; reports "...is up to date"
only for target files named explicitly on the command line,
to avoid cluttering the output.
Deciding When an Input File Has Changed: the &Decider; Function
Another aspect of avoiding unnecessary rebuilds
is the fundamental build tool behavior
of rebuilding
things when an input file changes,
so that the built software is up to date.
By default,
&SCons; keeps track of this through an
MD5 &signature;, or checksum, of the contents of each file,
although you can easily configure
&SCons; to use the
modification times (or time stamps)
instead.
You can even specify your own Python function
for deciding if an input file has changed.
Using MD5 Signatures to Decide if a File Has Changed
By default,
&SCons; keeps track of whether a file has changed
based on an MD5 checksum of the file's contents,
not the file's modification time.
This means that you may be surprised by the
default &SCons; behavior if you are used to the
&Make; convention of forcing
a rebuild by updating the file's modification time
(using the &touch; command, for example):
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% touch hello.c
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
Even though the file's modification time has changed,
&SCons; realizes that the contents of the
&hello_c; file have not changed,
and therefore that the &hello; program
need not be rebuilt.
This avoids unnecessary rebuilds when,
for example, someone rewrites the
contents of a file without making a change.
But if the contents of the file really do change,
then &SCons; detects the change
and rebuilds the program as required:
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% edit hello.c
[CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF hello.c]
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
Note that you can, if you wish,
specify this default behavior
(MD5 signatures) explicitly
using the &Decider; function as follows:
Program('hello.c')
Decider('MD5')
You can also use the string 'content'
as a synonym for 'MD5'
when calling the &Decider; function.
Ramifications of Using MD5 Signatures
Using MD5 Signatures to decide if an input file has changed
has one surprising benefit:
if a source file has been changed
in such a way that the contents of the
rebuilt target file(s)
will be exactly the same as the last time
the file was built,
then any "downstream" target files
that depend on the rebuilt-but-not-changed target
file actually need not be rebuilt.
So if, for example,
a user were to only change a comment in a &hello_c; file,
then the rebuilt &hello_o; file
would be exactly the same as the one previously built
(assuming the compiler doesn't put any build-specific
information in the object file).
&SCons; would then realize that it would not
need to rebuild the &hello; program as follows:
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% edit hello.c
[CHANGE A COMMENT IN hello.c]
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
scons: `hello' is up to date.
In essence, &SCons;
"short-circuits" any dependent builds
when it realizes that a target file
has been rebuilt to exactly the same file as the last build.
This does take some extra processing time
to read the contents of the target (&hello_o;) file,
but often saves time when the rebuild that was avoided
would have been time-consuming and expensive.
Using Time Stamps to Decide If a File Has Changed
If you prefer, you can
configure &SCons; to use the modification time
of a file, not the file contents,
when deciding if a target needs to be rebuilt.
&SCons; gives you two ways to use time stamps
to decide if an input file has changed
since the last time a target has been built.
The most familiar way to use time stamps
is the way &Make; does:
that is, have &SCons; decide
and target must be rebuilt if
if a source file's modification time is
newer
than the target file.
To do this, call the &Decider;
function as follows:
Program('hello.c')
Decider('timestamp-newer')
This makes &SCons; act like &Make;
when a file's modification time is updated
(using the &touch; command, for example):
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% touch hello.c
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
And, in fact, because this behavior is the same
as the behavior of &Make;,
you can also use the string 'make'
as a synonym for 'timestamp-newer'
when calling the &Decider; function:
Program('hello.c')
Decider('make')
One drawback to using times stamps exactly like &Make;
is that if an input file's modification time suddenly
becomes older than a target file,
the target file will not be rebuilt.
This can happen if an old copy of a source file is restored
from a backup archive, for example.
The contents of the restored file will likely be different
than they were the last time a dependent target was built,
but the target won't be rebuilt
because the modification time of the source file
is not newer than the target.
Because &SCons; actually stores information
about the source files' time stamps whenever a target is built,
it can handle this situation by checking for
an exact match of the source file time stamp,
instead of just whether or not the source file
is newer than the target file.
To do this, specify the argument
'timestamp-match'
when calling the &Decider; function:
Program('hello.c')
Decider('timestamp-match')
When configured this way,
&SCons; will rebuild a target whenever
a source file's modification time has changed.
So if we use the touch -t
option to change the modification time of
&hello_c; to an old date (January 1, 1989),
&SCons; will still rebuild the target file:
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% touch -t 198901010000 hello.c
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
scons: `hello' is up to date.
In general, the only reason to prefer
timestamp-newer
instead of
timestamp-match,
would be if you have some specific reason
to require this &Make;-like behavior of
not rebuilding a target when an otherwise-modified
source file is older.
Deciding If a File Has Changed Using Both MD Signatures and Time Stamps
As a performance enhancement,
&SCons; provides a way to use
MD5 checksums of file contents
but to only read the contents
whenever the file's timestamp has changed.
To do this, call the &Decider;
function with 'MD5-timestamp'
argument as follows:
Program('hello.c')
Decider('MD5-timestamp')
So configured, &SCons; will still behave like
it does when using Decider('MD5'):
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% touch hello.c
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
% edit hello.c
[CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF hello.c]
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
However, the second call to &SCons; in the above output,
when the build is up-to-date,
will have been performed by simply looking at the
modification time of the &hello_c; file,
not by opening it and performing
an MD5 checksum calcuation on its contents.
This can significantly speed up many up-to-date builds.
The only drawback to using
Decider('MD5-timestamp')
is that &SCons; will not
rebuild a target file if a source file was modified
within one second of the last time &SCons; built the file.
While most developers are programming,
this isn't a problem in practice,
since it's unlikely that someone will have built
and then thought quickly enought to make a substantive
change to a source file within one second.
Certain build scripts or
continuous integration tools may, however,
rely on the ability to applying changes to files
automatically and then rebuild as quickly as possible,
in which case use of
Decider('MD5-timestamp')
may not be appropriate.
Writing Your Own Custom &Decider; Function
The different string values that we've passed to
the &Decider; function are essentially used by &SCons;
to pick one of several specific internal functions
that implement various ways of deciding if a dependency
(usually a source file)
has changed since a target file has been built.
As it turns out,
you can also supply your own function
to decide if a dependency has changed.
For example, suppose we have an input file
that contains a lot of data,
in some specific regular format,
that is used to rebuild a lot of different target files,
but each target file really only depends on
one particular section of the input file.
We'd like to have each target file depend on
only its section of the input file.
However, since the input file may contain a lot of data,
we only want to open the input file if its timestamp has changed.
This could done with a custom
&Decider; function that might look something like this:
Program('hello.c')
def decide_if_changed(dependency, target, prev_ni):
if self.get_timestamp() != prev_ni.timestamp:
dep = str(dependency)
tgt = str(target)
if specific_part_of_file_has_changed(dep, tgt):
return True
return False
Decider(decide_if_changed)
Note that in the function definition,
the dependency
(input file) is the first argument,
and then the ⌖.
Both of these are passed to the functions as
SCons &Node; objects,
which we convert to strings using the Python
str().
The third argument, prev_ni,
is an object that holds the
signature or timestamp information
that was recorded about the dependency
the last time the target was built.
A prev_ni object can hold
different information,
depending on the type of thing that the
dependency argument represents.
For normal files,
the prev_ni object
has the following attributes:
.csig
The content signature,
or MD5 checksum, of the contents of the
dependency
file the list time the ⌖ was built.
.size
The size in bytes of the dependency
file the list time the target was built.
.timestamp
The modification time of the dependency
file the list time the ⌖ was built.
Note that ignoring some of the arguments
in your custom &Decider; function
is a perfectly normal thing to do,
if they don't impact the way you want to
decide if the dependency file has changed.
Mixing Different Ways of Deciding If a File Has Changed
The previous examples have all demonstrated calling
the global &Decider; function
to configure all dependency decisions that &SCons; makes.
Sometimes, however, you want to be able to configure
different decision-making for different targets.
When that's necessary, you can use the
env.Decider
method to affect only the configuration
decisions for targets built with a
specific construction environment.
For example, if we arbitrarily want to build
one program using MD5 checkums
and another use file modification times
from the same source
we might configure it this way:
env1 = Environment(CPPPATH = ['.'])
env2 = env1.Clone()
env2.Decider('timestamp-match')
env1.Program('prog-MD5', 'program1.c')
env2.Program('prog-timestamp', 'program2.c')
If both of the programs include the same
inc.h file,
then updating the modification time of
inc.h
(using the &touch; command)
will cause only prog-timestamp
to be rebuilt:
% scons -Q
cc -o program1.o -c -I. program1.c
cc -o prog-MD5 program1.o
cc -o program2.o -c -I. program2.c
cc -o prog-timestamp program2.o
% touch inc.h
% scons -Q
cc -o program2.o -c -I. program2.c
cc -o prog-timestamp program2.o
Older Functions for Deciding When an Input File Has Changed
&SCons; still supports two functions that used to be the
primary methods for configuring the
decision about whether or not an input file has changed.
Although they're not officially deprecated yet,
their use is discouraged,
mainly because they rely on a somewhat
confusing distinction between how
source files and target files are handled.
These functions are documented here mainly in case you
encounter them in existing &SConscript; files.
The &SourceSignatures; Function
The &SourceSignatures; function is fairly straightforward,
and supports two different argument values
to configure whether source file changes should be decided
using MD5 signatures:
Program('hello.c')
SourceSignatures('MD5')
Or using time stamps:
Program('hello.c')
SourceSignatures('timestamp')
These are roughly equivalent to specifying
Decider('MD5')
or
Decider('timestamp-match'),
respectively,
although it only affects how SCons makes
decisions about dependencies on
source files--that is,
files that are not built from any other files.
The &TargetSignatures; Function
The &TargetSignatures; function
specifies how &SCons; decides
when a target file has changed
when it is used as a
dependency of (input to) another target--that is,
the &TargetSignatures; function configures
how the signatures of "intermediate" target files
are used when deciding if a "downstream" target file
must be rebuilt.
This easily-overlooked distinction between
how &SCons; decides if the target itself must be rebuilt
and how the target is then used to decide if a different
target must be rebuilt is one of the confusing
things that has led to the &TargetSignatures;
and &SourceSignatures; functions being
replaced by the simpler &Decider; function.
The &TargetSignatures; function supports the same
'MD5' and 'timestamp'
argument values that are supported by the &SourceSignatures;,
with the same meanings, but applied to target files.
That is, in the example:
Program('hello.c')
TargetSignatures('MD5')
The MD5 checksum of the &hello_o; target file
will be used to decide if it has changed since the last
time the "downstream" &hello; target file was built.
And in the example:
Program('hello.c')
TargetSignatures('timestamp')
The modification time of the &hello_o; target file
will be used to decide if it has changed since the last
time the "downstream" &hello; target file was built.
The &TargetSignatures; function supports
two additional argument values:
'source' and 'build'.
The 'source' argument
specifies that decisions involving
whether target files have changed
since a previous build
should use the same behavior
for the decisions configured for source files
(using the &SourceSignatures; function).
So in the example:
Program('hello.c')
TargetSignatures('source')
SourceSignatures('timestamp')
All files, both targets and sources,
will use modification times
when deciding if an input file
has changed since the last
time a target was built.
Lastly, the 'build' argument
specifies that &SCons; should examine
the build status of a target file
and always rebuild a "downstream" target
if the target file was itself rebuilt,
without re-examining the contents or timestamp
of the newly-built target file.
If the target file was not rebuilt during
this &scons; invocation,
then the target file will be examined
the same way as configured by
the &SourceSignature; call
to decide if it has changed.
This mimics the behavior of
build signatures
in earlier versions of &SCons;.
A &buildsignature; re-combined
signatures of all the input files
that went into making the target file,
so that the target file itself
did not need to have its contents read
to compute an MD5 signature.
This can improve performance for some configurations,
but is generally not as effective as using
Decider('MD5-timestamp').
Implicit Dependencies: The &cv-CPPPATH; Construction Variable
Now suppose that our "Hello, World!" program
actually has an #include line
to include the &hello_h; file in the compilation:
#include <hello.h>
int
main()
{
printf("Hello, %s!\n", string);
}
And, for completeness, the &hello_h; file looks like this:
#define string "world"
In this case, we want &SCons; to recognize that,
if the contents of the &hello_h; file change,
the &hello; program must be recompiled.
To do this, we need to modify the
&SConstruct; file like so:
Program('hello.c', CPPPATH = '.')
The &cv-link-CPPPATH; value
tells &SCons; to look in the current directory
('.')
for any files included by C source files
(.c or .h files).
With this assignment in the &SConstruct; file:
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c -I. hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
% edit hello.h
[CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF hello.h]
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c -I. hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
First, notice that &SCons;
added the -I. argument
from the &cv-CPPPATH; variable
so that the compilation would find the
&hello_h; file in the local directory.
Second, realize that &SCons; knows that the &hello;
program must be rebuilt
because it scans the contents of
the &hello_c; file
for the #include lines that indicate
another file is being included in the compilation.
&SCons; records these as
implicit dependencies
of the target file,
Consequently,
when the &hello_h; file changes,
&SCons; realizes that the &hello_c; file includes it,
and rebuilds the resulting &hello; program
that depends on both the &hello_c; and &hello_h; files.
Like the &cv-link-LIBPATH; variable,
the &cv-CPPPATH; variable
may be a list of directories,
or a string separated by
the system-specific path separation character
(':' on POSIX/Linux, ';' on Windows).
Either way, &SCons; creates the
right command-line options
so that the following example:
Program('hello.c', CPPPATH = ['include', '/home/project/inc'])
Will look like this on POSIX or Linux:
% scons -Q hello
cc -o hello.o -c -Iinclude -I/home/project/inc hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
And like this on Windows:
C:\>scons -Q hello.exe
cl /nologo /Iinclude /I\home\project\inc /c hello.c /Fohello.obj
link /nologo /OUT:hello.exe hello.obj
Caching Implicit Dependencies
Scanning each file for #include lines
does take some extra processing time.
When you're doing a full build of a large system,
the scanning time is usually a very small percentage
of the overall time spent on the build.
You're most likely to notice the scanning time,
however, when you rebuild
all or part of a large system:
&SCons; will likely take some extra time to "think about"
what must be built before it issues the
first build command
(or decides that everything is up to date
and nothing must be rebuilt).
In practice, having &SCons; scan files saves time
relative to the amount of potential time
lost to tracking down subtle problems
introduced by incorrect dependencies.
Nevertheless, the "waiting time"
while &SCons; scans files can annoy
individual developers waiting for their builds to finish.
Consequently, &SCons; lets you cache
the implicit dependencies
that its scanners find,
for use by later builds.
You can do this by specifying the
&implicit-cache; option on the command line:
% scons -Q --implicit-cache hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
If you don't want to specify &implicit-cache;
on the command line each time,
you can make it the default behavior for your build
by setting the &implicit_cache; option
in an &SConscript; file:
SetOption('implicit_cache', 1)
&SCons; does not cache implicit dependencies like this by default
because the &implicit-cache; causes &SCons; to simply use the implicit
dependencies stored during the last run, without any checking
for whether or not those dependencies are still correct.
Specifically, this means &implicit-cache; instructs &SCons;
to not rebuild "correctly" in the
following cases:
When &implicit-cache; is used, &SCons; will ignore any changes that
may have been made to search paths
(like &cv-CPPPATH; or &cv-LIBPATH;,).
This can lead to &SCons; not rebuilding a file if a change to
&cv-CPPPATH; would normally cause a different, same-named file from
a different directory to be used.
When &implicit-cache; is used, &SCons; will not detect if a
same-named file has been added to a directory that is earlier in
the search path than the directory in which the file was found
last time.
The &implicit-deps-changed; Option
When using cached implicit dependencies,
sometimes you want to "start fresh"
and have &SCons; re-scan the files
for which it previously cached the dependencies.
For example,
if you have recently installed a new version of
external code that you use for compilation,
the external header files will have changed
and the previously-cached implicit dependencies
will be out of date.
You can update them by
running &SCons; with the &implicit-deps-changed; option:
% scons -Q --implicit-deps-changed hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
In this case, &SCons; will re-scan all of the implicit dependencies
and cache updated copies of the information.
The &implicit-deps-unchanged; Option
By default when caching dependencies,
&SCons; notices when a file has been modified
and re-scans the file for any updated
implicit dependency information.
Sometimes, however, you may want
to force &SCons; to use the cached implicit dependencies,
even if the source files changed.
This can speed up a build for example,
when you have changed your source files
but know that you haven't changed
any #include lines.
In this case,
you can use the &implicit-deps-unchanged; option:
% scons -Q --implicit-deps-unchanged hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
In this case,
&SCons; will assume that the cached implicit
dependencies are correct and
will not bother to re-scan changed files.
For typical builds after small,
incremental changes to source files,
the savings may not be very big,
but sometimes every bit of
improved performance counts.
Explicit Dependencies: the &Depends; Function
Sometimes a file depends on another file
that is not detected by an &SCons; scanner.
For this situation,
&SCons; allows you to specific explicitly that one file
depends on another file,
and must be rebuilt whenever that file changes.
This is specified using the &Depends; method:
hello = Program('hello.c')
Depends(hello, 'other_file')
% scons -Q hello
cc -c hello.c -o hello.o
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
% edit other_file
[CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF other_file]
% scons -Q hello
cc -c hello.c -o hello.o
cc -o hello hello.o
Note that the dependency
(the second argument to &Depends;)
may also be a list of Node objects
(for example, as returned by a call to a Builder):
hello = Program('hello.c')
goodbye = Program('goodbye.c')
Depends(hello, goodbye)
in which case the dependency or dependencies
will be built before the target(s):
% scons -Q hello
cc -c goodbye.c -o goodbye.o
cc -o goodbye goodbye.o
cc -c hello.c -o hello.o
cc -o hello hello.o
Ignoring Dependencies: the &Ignore; Function
Sometimes it makes sense
to not rebuild a program,
even if a dependency file changes.
In this case,
you would tell &SCons; specifically
to ignore a dependency as follows:
hello = Program('hello.c')
Ignore(hello, 'hello.h')
% scons -Q hello
cc -c -o hello.o hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
% edit hello.h
[CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF hello.h]
% scons -Q hello
scons: `hello' is up to date.
Now, the above example is a little contrived,
because it's hard to imagine a real-world situation
where you wouldn't want to rebuild &hello;
if the &hello_h; file changed.
A more realistic example
might be if the &hello;
program is being built in a
directory that is shared between multiple systems
that have different copies of the
&stdio_h; include file.
In that case,
&SCons; would notice the differences between
the different systems' copies of &stdio_h;
and would rebuild &hello;
each time you change systems.
You could avoid these rebuilds as follows:
hello = Program('hello.c', CPPPATH=['/usr/include'])
Ignore(hello, '/usr/include/stdio.h')
Order-Only Dependencies: the &Requires; Function
Occasionally,
it may be useful to specify that a certain
file or directory must, if necessary,
be built or created before some other target is built,
but that changes to that file or directory
do not
require that the target itself be rebuilt.
Such a relationship is called an
order-only dependency
because it only affects the order in which
things must be built--the dependency before the target--but
it is not a strict dependency relationship
because the target should not
change in response to changes in the dependent file.
For example, suppose that you want to create a file
every time you run a build
that identifies the time the build was performed,
the version number, etc.,
and which is included in every program that you build.
The version file's contents will change every build.
If you specify a normal dependency relationship,
then every program that depends on
that file would be rebuilt every time you ran &SCons;.
For example, we could use some Python code in
a &SConstruct; file to create a new version.c file
with a string containing the current date every time
we run &SCons;,
and then link a program with the resulting object file
by listing version.c in the sources:
import time
version_c_text = """
char *date = "%s";
""" % time.ctime(time.time())
open('version.c', 'w').write(version_c_text)
hello = Program(['hello.c', 'version.c'])
If we list version.c as an actual source file,
though, then version.o
will get rebuilt every time we run &SCons;
(because the &SConstruct; file itself changes
the contents of version.c)
and the hello executable
will get re-linked every time
(because the version.o file changes):
% scons -Q
gcc -o hello.o -c hello.c
gcc -o version.o -c version.c
gcc -o hello hello.o version.o
% scons -Q
gcc -o version.o -c version.c
gcc -o hello hello.o version.o
% scons -Q
gcc -o version.o -c version.c
gcc -o hello hello.o version.o
One solution is to use the &Requires; function
to specify that the version.o
must be rebuilt before it is used by the link step,
but that changes to version.o
should not actually cause the hello
executable to be re-linked:
import time
version_c_text = """
char *date = "%s";
""" % time.ctime(time.time())
open('version.c', 'w').write(version_c_text)
version_obj = Object('version.c')
hello = Program('hello.c',
LINKFLAGS = str(version_obj[0]))
Requires(hello, version_obj)
Notice that because we can no longer list version.c
as one of the sources for the hello program,
we have to find some other way to get it into the link command line.
For this example, we're cheating a bit and stuffing the
object file name (extracted from version_obj
list returned by the &b-Object; call)
into the &cv-link-LINKFLAGS; variable,
because &cv-LINKFLAGS; is already included
in the &cv-link-LINKCOM; command line.
With these changes,
we get the desired behavior of
re-building the version.o file,
and therefore re-linking the hello executable,
only when the hello.c has changed:
% scons -Q
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o version.o -c version.c
cc -o hello version.o hello.o
% scons -Q
scons: `.' is up to date.
% edit hello.c
[CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF hello.c]
% scons -Q
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello version.o hello.o
% scons -Q
scons: `.' is up to date.
The &AlwaysBuild; Function
How &SCons; handles dependencies can also be affected
by the &AlwaysBuild; method.
When a file is passed to the &AlwaysBuild; method,
like so:
hello = Program('hello.c')
AlwaysBuild(hello)
Then the specified target file (&hello; in our example)
will always be considered out-of-date and
rebuilt whenever that target file is evaluated
while walking the dependency graph:
% scons -Q
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q
cc -o hello hello.o
The &AlwaysBuild; function has a somewhat misleading name,
because it does not actually mean the target file will
be rebuilt every single time &SCons; is invoked.
Instead, it means that the target will, in fact,
be rebuilt whenever the target file is encountered
while evaluating the targets specified on
the command line (and their dependencies).
So specifying some other target on the command line,
a target that does not
itself depend on the &AlwaysBuild; target,
will still be rebuilt only if it's out-of-date
with respect to its dependencies:
% scons -Q
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q hello.o
scons: `hello.o' is up to date.