Re: Very touchy eager-to-remake make or kernel makefiles?

From: Ricky Beam (jfbeam@bluetopia.net)
Date: Sun Jun 18 2000 - 12:05:31 EST


On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Mike Frisch wrote:
>On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Russell King wrote:
>> I've just noticed that yet again make seems to be building a lot of
>> files for apparantly no reason.
>
>I noticed a similar problem when patching a previously compiled 2.2.16
>source tree with the latest NFSv3 patches. The updated RPC files caused
>various unrelated files to be rebuilt (ie. ../fs/proc/scsi.c).

Well, there is a reason... there is a weak build avoidance system within
the kernel makefile system that tries to check the "flags" used during
compilation. If something doesn't get its flags marked, then it will be
forced to be rebuilt -- I toyed with fixing this, but it's too much of a
mess to be fixed easily. You'd think after 10 years, someone would have
learned to write a makefile *sigh* (I've spent the last several months
retooling 196 Makefiles at work -- and I _know_ those people don't know
how to write a makefile.)

>As for 'make', this is one place where (dare, I say) Microsoft's 'nmake'
>excels. It has a '-d' command-line option that displays the dependency
>list for all targets. When working with large projects, it's a fantastic
>way to find broken makefiles.

I'll give my usual plug for Rational Clearcase at this point. clearmake
excels at dependency checking -- and see as it audits accesses to the
clearcase MVFS, it'll build depends you didn't even know were there
(including env vars) [I LOVE clearcase... if they had MVFS support for
Linux, I'd buy my own copy.]

--Ricky

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