Re: Improvement on parallel make

[Philip Guenther]

On 12/11/06, Alexey Neyman <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Monday 11 December 2006 16:40, Philip Guenther wrote:
> > 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?
>
> No.
<example elided>

So the target in which the .WAIT appears is completely irrelevant.
Blech.  What a completely misleading syntax.


> > As is, it's apparent action-at-a-distance would seem to invite creation of
> > unmaintainable makefiles.
>
> In this regard, it is a property of the "bar" and "baz" targets - there
> is no action-at-a-distance in this case.

The fact that it isn't dependent on the target in which it appears
means it isn't completely insane, but it's still bizarre that the
ordering of two targets would be affected by their appearance in an
otherwise unrelated dependency list.

I'm also unimpressed by the fact that the cited examples all seem to
use .WAIT as a kludge around the incomplete dependency tree of a
recursive make setup.  Making that particular hole easier to live in
just means more people will dig themselves into it...


Philip Guenther