913136 - Ability to process a moz.build file in the context of a directory without incurring directory traversal

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

Problem: Currently moz.build files are evaluated by:

1) Adding a directory to one of the *DIRS variables. The directory is traversed as part of the build system. We assume it contains a Makefile.

2) Calling include(). The included file is evaluated within the context of the currently executing file.

I would to add a new method:

3) Evaluate a specified file in the context of another directory but don't inherit directory traversal semantics.

Eventually, the goal would be for everything in moz.build to use this primitive and for the DIRS variables to go away (because we're not using make traversal).

We can bikeshed over the naming. But I was thinking something like:

  INCLUDES (list of extra sandbox files to process)
  BUILD_FILES (ditto)
  process(path, <reserved for future arguments>)