On Wed, 12 Jun 2019 16:02:15 -0400, Paul Smith <psm...@gnu.org> wrote: > I get that having a make that "does everying right out of the box" is > seductive, but I'm not on board at this point.
I actually don't care about whether or not it's "in the box" of make. I care about making it easy to perform the check. If it's something you have to separately install & invoke that's fine, as long as it's *easy*. However, it has to be *easy*. The install must be no more than "apt-get install make-audit" or "pip3 install make-audit" or similar. Normal use must be no more than "make-audit [target]". If it's any more complicated then that's a bug. Nobody likes complicated things for normal use cases. It also needs to eventually handle make in its full generality (e.g., if a user sets .ONESHELL to perl, it should still work). > I would be willing to work with people who wanted to implement such > things as loadable modules in GNU make, to ensure that the loadable > module API is enhanced in such a way that writing a module like this is > feasible. As long as there's a mechanism that works easily that'd be great. However, it's not clear to me that the hooks needed are easily available. Also, the loadable modules stuff requires that I have a compiled object. That's a big pain to set up & makes it difficult to create an easy-to-install system across platforms. I'd rather be able to simply call a program or shell script. If I'm calling a command I'm already paying a price anyway. In the short term I can abuse .ONESHELL and SHELL=, but that will struggle wrapping Makefiles that already use .ONESHELL and SHELL=. Would there be an appetite for a new Makefile variable that could specify how to wrap a command about to be executed? I haven't worked out the details, but that would make much easier to wrap programs & would be very general. > As DavidB pointed out, there are already project that attempt to > provide some of these features I took a look at his Poor Man's File Auditor (https://github.com/boyski/pmaudit). It doesn't quite do what I want, but his approach looks like a *much* more promising direction than using strace. Instead of trying to use strace, pmaudit simply checks the atime & mtime before & after execution. That's extraordinarily portable (it even works on Cygwin) and FAR less fussy. It can't monitor lstat & friends, but I think that's okay. inotify can't notice lstats either, strace imposes a huge performance overhead, and LD_PRELOAD is fussy & hard to keep up with (I know, I've done complicated things with it). The pmaudit approach appears simple & rock-solid. --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
