Re: Failure in test silent5.test with heirloom make

[Stefano Lattarini]

At Tuesday 20 April 2010, Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> 
wrote:
> * Ralf Wildenhues wrote on Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 11:25:41PM CEST:
> > I'm guessing this has to do with chains of inference rules not
> > being detected or so.
> 
> Yeah, the make has a .l.o rule that triggers before our .l.c and
>  .c.o rule chains.
Do you know if this happens also with Solaris make, or is just a quirk 
specific to heirloom-make?

> [FROM ANOTHER MAIL]
> Where can I get this heirloom-make?  Is there a Debian package for
> it? 
For the record, heirloom make is part of the Heirloom project 
<http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/>, which provides many unix utilities 
and developement tools derived from original Unix material released as 
Open Source by Caldera and Sun.

The manpage for heirloom make is here:
  <http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/devtools/make.1.html>
from which is appearent that it has a builtin `.l.o' rule.

> [FROM ANOTHER MAIL]
> I'm not bound to bother much with this issue because no user is
> forced to pain herself with heirloom-make (and even Solaris make is
> better).
Well, I'm using heirloom-make for testing purposes only, since it 
seems to be the most Solaris-like make implementation easily available 
also on GNU/Linux.  If you have a pointer to a similar make 
implementation without the heirloom-specific quirks, I'd be happy to 
use it instead.

> I guess this could be worked around by adding explicit rules (at
>  least that's what SUSv3 recommends), maybe explicit dependencies
>  without rules suffice.  I'm not sure we should spend time on this
>  old make, though.
I think you're right.  Maybe the best solution for the present problem 
would be to properly divide `silent5.test' into many, more specific 
tests (e.g. one for c++, one for fortran, one for lex etc.), and then 
skip the Lex/Yacc test(s) if a buggy make is detected.
WDYT?

Regards,
   Stefano