Re: implementing emake's #pragma multi in GNU make?

[Mark Galeck]

--- On Fri, 2/8/13, Gerhard Fiedler <address@hidden> wrote:

> Having to rely on "clean" builds when incremental builds
> could do the
> job just fine is IMO either an artifact of an insufficient
> build system
> or a result of a bug (or missing feature) in make.


Gerhard,  IMHO you are misinterpreting me.  I am not relying on "clean" for 
anything.  In fact, I strongly recommend against using "clean" at all.  The 
build should work correctly without any need for clean.

The only use of clean, is to clean up when the user messed up, such as, I say, 
when they corrupted the system - like, deleted intermediate files.

I say, the only things the build system has to support is : touch the sources, 
and make anything that is a target, and the build system is supposed to perform 
correctly for any sequence of these steps.



You and Michael, and Eric, seem to be saying, "no, there is more to it".  

OK, what other "allowed" actions to you propose?  

Obviously, not all actions are allowed.  If you do your build, and then edit 
some bytes in your intermediate file, I hope we all agree that no system will 
correctly recover from that.  So that is not allowed.

Yet you are saying, that deleting the file is OK.

All right, then please explain where exactly you draw the line between 
"allowed" and "not allowed" actions to the intermediate files, and why you draw 
the line there and not somewhere else?  

Thank you for helping me understand.  

Mark