Question: How to have mutually exclusive targets?

[gabeblack]

Basically, I have two build targets that don't depend on each other, but because they use external build frameworks (wrapped in a meson custom_target to build them), they can't be built in parallel due to internal workings of the build framework (I believe it is writing to internal file locations that are hard coded). Is there some way to have two custom_targets that are not allowed to build in parallel with each other?

I could achieve this by having one depend on the other, but I don't want to have them depend on each other as they take a non-trivial amount of time to build and it is a common scenario to only build one of them. So I wouldn't want to require that one has to wait until the other is built (again, because they don't depend on each other).

Is there a way to accomplish this in meson?

Thank you in advance!

[eli-schwartz]

In general no.

You can mark one or both of them as console: true which fully disables parallelism, and then that target(s) cannot be built at the same time as anything else. This isn't what you want but can pass for it, kinda.

[gabeblack]

That's good enough I suppose. Thank you for the prompt reply!