Parser generators and dependencies with .ml{,y,i} files.

[jnfoster]

If I manually run Menhir in my source directory, it generates .ml and .mli files. If I forget to delete those files and then run jbuilder it will ignore subsequent changes to the .mly file, which can be very confusing.

[ghost]

Basically jbuilder always prefer the files in the source tree if they exist. This is useful for instance for configuration files, that can be either generated by a configure script or from a default configuration for development.

I suppose we could mark explicitly the files for which we want this behavior.

[jnfoster]

I understand. I see how doing anything different might be tricky given jbuilder's choice to not require the programmer to list out source files. Maybe there could be a mechanism for rules like (menhir ...) to somehow mark the .{ml,mli} files as generated and overwrite them or complain if they already exist?

[elfring]

How would you like to filter generated source files out from the other input files?