Am 08.07.2016 um 06:24 schrieb Meta:

I have two questions.

  1. Is it possible to build subpackages when dub build is invoked for the main package? It's a pain to first do dub build :mysubpackage and then dub build.

It depends on the target type of the root package. For dynamic libraries
and executables, adding the sub package as a dependency (i.e.
dependency ":mysubpackage" version="*") will cause it to be built
together with it. For static libraries this is currently not possible.

However, there is also https://github.com/dlang/dub/issues/97, so that
building root packages with target type "none" would instead build all
sub packages once it is implemented.

  1. It seems that when dub detects that no dependencies need to be updated, it does not run the pre-build commands. I have some pre-build commands that generate data to be imported by the main package and thus must always be run for a build. Is there a way to specify this?

It should run the pre-build commands whenever the package itself needs
to be rebuilt (i.e. it should generally be independent of its
dependencies in that regard). If it doesn't, that would definitely be a bug.

If you need them to run for every build invocation, regardless of the
need to rebuild the package itself, using a pre-generate command instead
would work. However, pre-generate commands will not be re-run when a
generated project file (e.g. VisualD) gets built.

If there are any files on which the generated data depends, putting the
commands in a dummy sub package on which the main package depends, and
adding the folder that contains the data dependencies as a
stringImportPath, should also work, even though this is obviously just a
hack.