Stefano Lattarini wrote: > On 04/11/2012 09:27 PM, Jim Meyering wrote: >> Surprised by parallel build failures, >> > Oops *blush* I must admit that, while I usually run the testsuite with > a high degree of parallelism, I also usually run the build proper with > a simple "make all", because that is so fast anyway. So I ended up > releasing the beta tarball without having truly tried a fully parallel > build -- how foolish. Do you think this issue warrants another beta > release? > >> I tracked them down: >> >> From 3fcf1fe611140eb6677d5893719bec1d96f106db Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 >> From: Jim Meyering <meyer...@redhat.com> >> Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:25:48 +0200 >> Subject: [PATCH] avoid parallel build failures >> > Minor tiny nit (feel free to ignore it): could you prepend the summary > line with either "build:" or "fixup:", so that the guidelines in HACKING > are followed? > >> A parallel build would fail when two concurrent sub-make processes >> tried to build lib/Automake/Config.pm. The loser would complain that >> grep: lib/Automake/Config.pm-t: No such file or directory >> chmod: cannot access `lib/Automake/Config.pm-t': No such file or\ >> directory >> make[1]: *** [lib/Automake/Config.pm] Error 1 >> * Makefile.am (update_mans): Don't build lib/Automake/Config.pm here. >> Instead, depend on it from the two rules that use it: >> ($(srcdir)/doc/aclocal-$(APIVERSION).1): Depend on it. >> ($(srcdir)/doc/automake-$(APIVERSION).1): Likewise. >> > Oops, a distributed file cannot depend on a non-distributed one :-( > This makes the patch unusable unfortunately.
IMHO, there is only one way to work around this: don't distribute those two files, i.e., generate them at build time. That means either automake distributes the help2man script (as coreutils does) or it adds help2man to its list of build-time dependencies, as diffutils, cppi, libtool and others do. Given automake's position in the system build-dependency graph I have a slight preference to include help2man in the tarball. The alternative is to try to guess at configure time whether the "extra" dependencies are required[*]. If not, elide the dependency and hope that the user does not run e.g., "make maintainer-clean", which would leave them with no doc/*.1 files and no reliable rules to rebuild them. [*] the dependencies would be required when not building from a tarball or when doc/*.1 do not exist.
