Hi! Recently I had an email discussion about build tools. Someone stated that make was flawed due to the fact that it uses timestamps to decide whether to recompile a file or not.
I disagree with saying that make is flawed. Actually NFS is flawed, which I encountered today: make recognized the files had changed (after I waited 6 seconds) and then compiled the old version provided by the dormant nfs server (actually invoking "less" always updates the nfs cache, so maybe make could be improved in this context) So I start to think about how to improve. Checking whether a file has changed is just a minor task among others that make has to address. I wonder how difficult it would be to change this part of make (maybe as an addition --use-checksums) when we rely on something like md5. Of course this leads to extra bookkeeping of md5 checksum pairs, but I do not mind having yet another hidden directory created by make. Any comments? Is there a reason for not having this feature? Markus _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
