Ordering dependencies

[Hitesh Kulkarni]

Hi

We have an intricate system of Makefiles that build our software. The
software is divided into modules which form a DAG which is fed to GNU make.
Through some analysis we have identified modules that take a long time to
build and want to get them going before anything else can start. We tried
introducing a rule to similar to


some_target : module1 module2 module3

module3: module1


$ gmake some_target -j


GNU make honors the order of modules when we use -j1 but as soon as we
increase the value for j, the ordering of modules doesn’t seem to work.

So in the above case with j value higher than 1 we observed that module1 is
built before module3 cause of the dependency, but module2 which is not
dependent on module1 or module3 isn’t always built before module3.

Is there any way we can explicitly provide hints to gmake to build in the
order that we provide?

Thank you.
Hitesh.