Re: Improvement on parallel make

[Philip Guenther]

On 12/11/06, Alexey Neyman <address@hidden> wrote:
...
> 3. BSD make associates the .WAIT semantics with a target, not with a
> dependency.

To clarify, are you saying that the .WAIT has no effect unless the
target whose dependency list it appears in is *somewhere* in the
dependency tree of the targets that make is actually building in this
run?

If so, is there an example of why that sort of "three party" behavior
is actually desired instead of treating .WAIT as a global requirement
on the involved dependencies?


> In the message mentioned above I described how .WAIT is implemented in
> BSD make; that seems to be the "right" approach.

Which of .WAIT's semantics are actually documented goals and which are
just side-effects of how the BSD make was, in general, implemented?
If those can't be disentangled, then the whole concept actually seems
kind of suspect to me.  As is, it's apparent action-at-a-distance
would seem to invite creation of unmaintainable makefiles.


Philip Guenther