Re: Rarely rebuilt files

[fr33domlover]

On 2014-11-12
Nick Bowler <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 2014-11-12 21:58 +0200, fr33domlover wrote:
> > On 2014-11-12
> > Nick Bowler <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > What is probably happening is that in VPATH builds from your tarball,
> > > your documentation is being rebuilt even though it was distributed.
> > > This is leaving files behind in your build directory, which distcheck
> > > is then complaining about.
> > > 
> > > Hope that helps,
> > 
> > Maybe this is a problem too, but there's something before that - see the
> > "make distclean" part above. I put the HTML files to be removed by "make
> > maintainer-clean", which means that "make distclean" is *not supposed to
> > remove them* - anyway, this is what I intend. So even without the error you
> > suggest, it should complain about files left in the builddir.
> > 
> > Am I right?
> 
> I think there may be some confusion about what distclean is supposed to
> do.  It is supposed to delete all generated files that were not part of
> the original distribution.  MAINTAINERCLEANFILES is a red herring.
> 
> In a VPATH build, there is a strict separation between the distributed
> files (in srcdir), and the build outputs (in builddir).  By definition,
> any file that shows up in builddir in this case was not part of the
> distribution (as it was created after unpacking the tarball), so
> distclean must delete it.
> 
> Distcheck is complaining about this apparent discrepancy.  The usual
> cause of these errors is when distributed files get erroneously rebuilt.
> 
> Since distributed files being rebuilt essentially defeats the whole
> point of distributing them in the first place, this suggests a bug in
> the build process.  Perhaps the distribution timestamps are not correct.
> 
> Cheers,



Here's part of my code:

all-local: ref

ref: ref-html
ref-html: ref-full-html ref-api-html
ref-full: ref-full-html
ref-api: ref-api-html
ref-full-html: $(reference_full_devhelp_chosen) \
               $(dist_reference_full_DATA)
ref-api-html: $(reference_api_devhelp_chosen) \
              $(dist_reference_api_DATA)

How does make determine whether it should rebuilt? After unpacking, the tag
file obviously has new last-modified/created time - maybe this causes make to
decide it must rebuild? The file is fresh new from the tarball, but it was of
course built at dist-time...

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