Re: make handling of prerequisites that interlock?

[Ben Pfaff]

Ted Stern <address@hidden> writes:

> On  4 Apr 2005 at 13:56 UTC-0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>> I'm having some trouble with a set of dependencies that
>> indirectly depend on a common file.  Here's a minimal makefile
>> that demonstrates the problem:

[...]

>> # Turn off implicit rules to make `make -d' output easier to read.
>> .SUFFIXES:
>> %: %,v
>> %: RCS/%,v
>> %: RCS/%
>> %: s.%
>> %: SCCS/s.%
>
> This is a bit of overkill.  I would recommend instead to always use
> the -R command line flag, which turns off all built-in rules and
> variables.  It is sort of like declaring IMPLICIT NONE in Fortran ;-).

This is simply part of my stripped-down example.  It is not
anything I would use in practice.  (However, I was not aware of
-R before.)

>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> When I run this in a tight loop, as with
>>
>>     rm -f foo
>>     touch x d
>>     while ! grep newer foo; do 
>>         make clean > /dev/null
>>         make > /dev/null
>>         echo x > x
>>         make -d > foo
>>     done
>>
>> it typically iterates for a few seconds (with most iterations not
>> seeing any change in file times, presumably because everything
>> happens too fast), and then stops with this output in foo:
>
> I can bet you're going to have problems here!  Why are you doing this?

To reliably demonstrate a problem that I have seen elsewhere in
other circumstances.

> I'd also recommend trying a different filesystem.  Reiserfs, for
> example, handles small files better.

Why do you think this issue is related to small file handling?
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