Re: Make timestame error

[Paul Eggert]

   From: David Bishop <address@hidden>
   Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 09:08:38 -0400

   > make: *** Warning: File `<path_to_file_on_server_above' has modification 
   > time in the future
   > make: *** Warning:  Clock skew detected.  Your build may be incomplete.

   Both machines in question are variations on the SUN Ultra Sparc.  Both
   clock boards (the mother board in one case) have been replaced.

The message means that the two clocks disagree, not that your clocks
are defective.  Disagreeing clocks can lead to "make" doing the wrong
thing, since "make" relies on a monotonically increasing clock.  This
is true of both Solaris "make" and GNU "make" -- their only difference
is that Solaris "make" silently does the wrong thing when the
timestamps are out of order, whereas GNU "make" noisily warns you when
it detects that the timestamps might be out of order.

You might consider running NTP to keep the clocks more in sync.  NTP
is supported by Sun in Solaris 7 and later and can be installed on
older Solaris versions.  However, even NTP won't guarantee absolute
synchrony; for that, you'll need to run on a single machine.