Re: [PATCH] docs: other issues with parallel BSD make (was: Re: bug#9245: FreeBSD make in concurrent mode report spurious success in automake-generated tests harness)

[Stefano Lattarini]

Hi Bob.

On Tuesday 16 August 2011, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Aug 2011, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> >>>
> >> I'll have a "draft patch" read soonish.  There is ample room for 
> >> improvements,
> >> but I'll post it here anyway since it can benefit from early feedback.
> >>
> > Here it is.  As usual, comments and suggestions welcome.
> 
> The proposed documentation seems quite useful.  It does have a flaw in 
> that it identifies 'make' programs based on the operating system where 
> they were currently found (e.g. "FreeBSD make").  The issues may 
> pertain to only certain versions of such make programs, or the 'make' 
> associated with an OS may be entirely supplanted (or optionally 
> replaced) with a 'make' which offers completely different behavior.
> 
> What is useful information today may become 'lore' in a few years so 
> it would be good to add additional data so that the reader (and 
> documentation maintainer) knows the vintage of the information.
> 
That's a good point.  Do you think it would be OK to put such information
only in Texinfo comments for the moment, and then, as a second and later
step, devise a way to report it in the final manual too?  This second step
wouldn't be trivial IMHO, since we would need to present such version
information in a way that is at the same time clear, non-obtrusive and
complete (mabe we could take a look at how Gnulib does this?).  Finally,
as a third step, we might try to revisit the existing examples of bugs
and portability pitfalls, and try to pin-point them to a precise version
of the system/tools used (in case this version is not already reported).

Regards,
  Stefano