Re: NFS share time skew too great for Make

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 22:42 +0000, David Wuertele wrote:
> I deploy a build system to many locations throughout the company, and these
> locations are managed by diverse IT groups.  A big problem is that the system
> time on these build systems doesn't match the system time of the mounted NFS
> filesystems to which the build outputs.  The skew can be as much as .06 
> seconds.
>  This confuses make and constantly breaks the build.
> 
> Unfortnately, the IT groups refuse to fix their system times.  And everyone
> comes crying to me.
> 
> I heard that there is a way to compile make to be more robust in the face of
> skewed system times.  I took a look at the source and nothing jumped out at 
> me.

You mean, besides escalating this up high enough that someone can tell
the IT group to stop being silly and implement NTP?  After all, is your
company making money off the products you develop, or are they making
money off of the IT group?

What you can do is use the .LOW_RESOLUTION_TIMESTAMP pseudo target (see
the manual).  Unfortunately, I just noticed that you can't enable it for
the entire makefile; it only accepts a specific list of targets.  That's
too bad, but it wouldn't be too difficult to change the code to allow a
global setting.

-- 
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 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
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 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist