Re: make error in base on Solaris

[Riccardo Mottola]

Stefan Bidigaray wrote:
> Ah... Sorry about that. When I looked at your original email this 
> morning I saw the config.status line and just assumed that's where the 
> error was coming from.

--trace was of help

> So it looks like the file comparison options of test are not portable. 
> The Heirloom project's sh, for example, does not provide it. [1]
>
> The code in line 105 is quite old, so I'm surprised you haven't run 
> into this problem before. Git blame says it's 5 years old [2].

It is! to be honest, I remember to have seen this problem before, but I 
never experienced it "hard blocking" like today.
I think I was used to always to a clean build or run configure manually, 
in that case it disappears.

Your cited manpages shows the options I have on Solaris, apparently.

>     I wonder how it can be made more portable. Or, having bash, if I
>     can run
>
>
> Maybe the solution is to simply revert this particular change? The old 
> code in this section of the Makefile looks reasonable. Honestly, I do 
> not understand why we would use the "-nt" options in a Makefile, to 
> begin with. The purpose of the make utility is exactly to run commands 
> based on the age of the files' dependencies, so why would we do this 
> manually with shell commands?

Exactly - the goal of make is itself timestamp dependency, so I don't 
get that part of the patch, maybe it can be partially reverted. Or it 
was some strange kind of workaround?

It is of Yavor, but Richard applied, maybe he can chime in to the 
discussion.

Riccardo