Craig Scott authored Feb 18, 2021 and Brad King committed Feb 22, 2021

The refactoring in 17e5516e (FetchContent: Invoke steps directly and
avoid a separate sub-build, 2021-01-29) uses a different way of writing
out the step scripts and updating time stamps when steps are executed.
That inadvertently always wrote out the scripts for custom commands,
even when the contents didn't change. This caused their timestamp to
always be updated, resulting in those steps always being seen as
out-of-date and needing to be re-executed.

The way timestamps were checked to determine whether to re-execute
a step also did not adequately account for file systems which only have
second-resolution timestamps. The IS_NEWER_THAN if condition also
returns true when timestamps are the same, so one needs to use the
negative form to get a true "is newer than" test.

ExternalProject is not susceptible to this problem because it uses
file(GENERATE) to write out the script files and that only updates the file's
timestamp if the contents change. It also mostly leaves timestamp
checking to the build tool.