Re: fatal errors for missing include files.

[Boris Kolpackov]

"Paul D. Smith" <address@hidden> writes:

>   id> Ok, but I am surprised you don't you see any problem (bug) with
>   id> the current way?
> 
> Not really.  The times where it makes any difference are very few,

I don't think the presence of the bug is in any way affected by the number
of situations it is manifested in. Also you cannot for sure say how many
such situations there are since not everybody is using make the way
you do. For what it's worth I am suffering from this bug too.


> the performance penalty that would be incurred to re-invoke make after
> each makefile was recreated could be quite large.

What would be nice is to have another flavor of include that would
be rebuilt sequentially without re-executing make. I.e., every time
make encounters such include directive it tries to rebuild the makefile
and then reads it in. This way has a number of benefits:

  - bug mentioned by the original poster goes away

  - more deterministic: if some of the code after (missing)
    included makefile depends on some code from it (for example a 
    function) then things will break.

  - more efficient since there is no make re-execution (hurts really
    badly in non-recursive makefiles where cost of re-parsing dependency
    graph can be quite significant).

What do you think?

-boris