The make problem

[Simon Marlow]

Ian Lynagh wrote:

> It looks like the make problem is not going to be fixed in the next
> release of make (and the current release only works because of a bug):
> 
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=15584
> 
> I'm afraid I haven't followed carefully enough to know what the problem
> is exactly, or how to fix it.

I skimmed through the discussion.  I wonder if someone who has a testbed 
set up for this could try to find a workaround - first thing to try 
would be to disable the empty ".SECONDARY" target in $TOP/mk/suffix.mk.

As I understand it, this is what's happening: the empty .SECONDARY 
target says "build everything you can, even intermediate files".  So 
make is traversing the entire dependency graph to find things to build, 
even though it has already figured out that it can't build the final 
target.  Furthermore, because it isn't caching the results of this 
traversal, it ends up traversing the graph many times.

I think we can safely do away with .SECONDARY, it was there to avoid 
make's mildly annoying habit of deleting intermediate files, but it's 
only a debugging issue (we like to see those intermediate files 
sometimes), it shouldn't cause any extra rebuilding to happen.

Cheers,
	Simon