Re: fatal errors for missing include files.

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Boris Kolpackov <address@hidden> writes:

  bk> "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,

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

If it is a bug then what you say is true, but I have never termed it a
bug.  It was a design decision taken between two alternative
implementations, and the code is operating the way it was designed and
intended to work.

The design is perhaps not the one you would choose or would prefer, but
that does not make it a bug.

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

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

This is also quite confusing.  At no time during the current make
processing does it jump out from the middle of the parser phase and into
the rule execution phase.  Not only that but the behavior would be quite
surprising to people who are familiar with make, since no rules or
variables that were defined after the include directive could be used
during the rebuild of the included makefile.

-- 
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