DISCUSSION: getting rid of parsers (and automatic dependencies)

I think HDLmake should get rid of the automatic computation of dependencies.

The main reason is that the parsers (which are based on regexp) are buggy and incomplete. You could reply: 'just fix them'. But no. This is not that simple. Fixing the parsers means writing full vhdl and systemverilog parsers. That's a lot of work. We could rely on external parsers, but there is no such parser in Python, so the installation would be more complex. And we need mixed vhdl/verilog dependencies.

Even with the best parsers we have to deal with encrypted modules...

Without the automatic dependencies, the behaviour would be like hdlmake -a. To ease the adoption of this new behaviour, we need to add some features. In particular, importing only some Manifest files from a module (and not only the top-level one).

Comments are welcome.