On Tuesday 03 May 2011, Paul Smith wrote: > On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 09:48 +0200, Stefano Lattarini wrote: > > > The other thing I was thinking is that this feature might want to be > > > enabled via a command-line argument. All the complex makefiles > > > generated by automake, etc. for example cannot take advantage of this > > > if you have to modify every makefile to add the special target. > > > > > > > > Not completely true. A developer using Automake who wants to take > > advantage of this feature could just add the line: > > .PARALLELSYNC: > > to his Makefile.am file(s). Automake's preprocessing policy is to > > pass through the things it doesn't understand (or that are not > > influential to it). > > Sure, I realize that. But that only helps developers. I was thinking > about users of open source software, building it on larger machines with > -jN and wanted to get "clean" output when it fails. That's my > situation: I have archived vanilla tarballs downloaded directly from the > upstream sites, and I have a makefile that does all that's necessary > (unpack them, configure, build, install, etc.) > > I certainly don't want to have to go modify the Makefile.am / > Makefile.in files to get this feature enabled. > I agree with all of this; and in fact I'm all in favor of having a command line switch to enable this new behaviour (like we currently have both the `.SILENT' target and the `-s' switch).
I only have to point out (and sorry if I look picky/grumpy doing so) that you'd have exactly the same kind of problems with "vanilla" packages using hand-written Makefiles -- you'd still have to modify them by hand if you want to get the new "outputsync" feature enabled. The fact that a Makefile has been written by hand or generated by Automake or CMake (or any other proprocessors) is irrelevant in this regard. > Also apropos of nothing, I don't like this name :-). Maybe .OUTPUTSYNC > or something would be better? PARALLELSYNC doesn't help understand what > the feature does. > `.OUTPUTSYNC' seems nicer indeed; but I'll leave it to you brave GNU make maintainers to figure out the color of the shed ;-) Once the new feature is not active by default, I'll be happy. Thanks, Stefano _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
