Re: Does (normal) prerequisite order matter?

[Matt England]

At 11/19/2005 04:51 AM, Brendan Heading wrote:
> > I don't yet see this explained clearly in any of the any of the manual 
> > (at http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_chapter/make_toc.html ), 
> > and I have read most of the manual, including the parts on rule-writing.
>
> The manual definitely says that the prereqs are always processed 
> left-to-right for non-parallel builds.

Can you possibly point out the section/verbiage that refers to this?  I 
went on a sincere search for this a while back and didn't see it.  Thanks 
for any help.

-Matt

> I'd suggest avoiding using any of make's more advanced syntax, and instead 
> look into your prerequisites and understand why they are interdependent. 
> Then you can do something like
>
> target: prereq1 prereq2
>
> prereq2:prereq1
>         <do prereq2>
> prereq1:
>         <do prereq1>
>
> With the above syntax, we are explicitly telling make to order the prereq 
> processing in a certain way even if there are parallel builds.

Sounds like good advice.

However, a problem arises with vpath and directories that are created at 
makefile run time.  I plan on starting a separate email thread on this topic.

-Matt