RE: Canonical method of rebuilding makefiles?

[Miller, Bryan]

On Thursday, March 07, 2002 6:20 AM, Paul D. Smith appears to have written:
> 

[ snippy snip ]

>  mb> Is there a better way to do this (double colon rule?)?  I have
>  mb> read section 3.5 (How Makefiles are Remade) of the GNU Make book
>  mb> (3.77) but it really muddies the waters quite a bit.  It suggests
>  mb> that make will consider all makefiles (and include.mk files) as
>  mb> targets and will rebuild them if a rule is provide.
>
> Why is that muddy?  That is _exactly_ what will happen.
>
>  mb> I have not found that to be true in clearmake GNU compat mode.
> 
> Aha!!
> 
> You are not using GNU make, you are using clearmake -C gnu.
> 
> That explains everything.
> 
> Clearmake does _NOT_ support this feature (rebuild/re-exec if included
> files change), even in GNU emulation mode.  In fact, there are quite a
> number of GNU make features that clearmake -C gnu does not support.
> Clearmake -C gnu is essentially a strict subset of GNU make.
> 
> If you have questions about behaviors please try them with vanilla GNU
> make first, and if it doesn't work there feel free to ask on these
> lists.  If it does work there but not in clearmake -C gnu you should
> file a bug against clearmake :).

Thanks much Paul.

I was going back and forth between GNU make and then clearmake -C gnu and
getting disparate results.  I suspected it was the lateness of the hour but
you have confirmed my suspicions about the compatability with clearmake.  I
didn't want to revert to the backtick style of slurping in content since
this is meant to be run on Solaris, HP-UX and Win32 and I have had problems
overflowing buffers in Win32 before using that constuct.

I will file an RFE against clearmake and try something else until it is
resolved.

Cheers,
Bryan