make "quickworld"? (like in DragonFly)

[Tom Alsberg]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 04:56:19PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> <snip />
> > So there's no good reason for a make to fail unless something very odd
> > happened (with the timestamps, etc.) or something like this happens,
> > it means some dependency is missing, or some script external to the
> > Makefile did something wrong.
> 
> That may be true for simple projects but this isn't a simple project.  For 
> example, when gcc was recently upgraded it changed the ABI for C++.  Imagine 
> if one had mismatched .o files for libstdc++ if some of the source files 
> didn't change.  That kind of dependency (on a compiler ABI) is not easily 
> expressed in Makefilesm, and certainly not cleanly.

True...  As I said, there may be some exceptions, like midway compiler
changes (in case of ABI incompatibility - although I wonder, why is it
shared objects are compatible and plain ones aren't?), timestamp
wrecks, or massive header file changes, etc.  However, normally, I
can't see such things happening, so I suppose that just continuing a
make should work then.

Nothing really serious, I just thought I had to comment about it after
having dealt with many annoying broken Makefiles of some projects
(which break on every update, or try to compile stuff during 'make
install', or recompile almost everything on every minor typo fix...) -
take the state of Mozilla and Samba two years ago for example.

  -- Tom

-- 
  Tom Alsberg - hacker (being the best description fitting this space)
  Web page:	http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alsbergt/
DISCLAIMER:  The above message does not even necessarily represent what
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