Re: diffutils 2.8.4 bug when make -j is used

[Chris Bainbridge]

On Sunday 13 October 2002 7:40 pm, Paul Eggert wrote:
>
> Sorry, I don't get it.  () and {;} are formally identical in this
> context.  Perhaps {;} works around the bug in some cases, but I don't
> see how it could be a reliable fix for the problem.

My mistake, I thought they were handled differently by make.

> diffutils-2.8.4/src/Makefile says that diff.$(OBJECT) depends on
> paths.h, so if 'make -j' is trying to start the compilation of diff.c
> before finishing the build of paths.h, then it would appear that 'make
> -j' is busted.  Such a bug will most likely affect other builds too,
> albeit sporadically, so we really should fix the 'make -j' bug rather
> than worrying about changing scads of makefiles to work around the
> bug.
>
> I'll CC: this to <address@hidden> to give them a heads-up about the
> problem.  Which version of 'make' were you using?  And which shell is
> 'make' invoking?

make 3.79.1. bash 2.05a. 

I've been testing some more. I have only seen the problem at make -j5 or -j6. 
Even then its intermittent. I tried it on 2 computers. It doesn't show up at 
all on a p3-700, only on p4-1600. The best way to reproduce seems to be to 
start with a totally fresh directory and do:

while true; do tar -zxvf /usr/portage/distfiles/diffutils-2.8.4.tar.gz; cd 
diffutils-2.8.4/; ./configure; make -j5 || break; cd ..; rm -rf 
diffutils-2.8.4; done

this shows up the bug within 5 mins here.