OSTree and Ninja; or, Merkle trees and Build systems [LWN.net]

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In traditional build tools like Make, targets and dependencies are always files . Imagine if you could specify an entire tree (directory) as a dependency: You could exhaustively specify a "build root" filesystem containing the toolchain used for building some target as a dependency of that target. Similarly, a rule that creates that build root would have the tree as its target . Using Merkle trees…

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