Re: make goes into an infinite loop

[Ian Lynagh]

Hi David,

On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 07:13:18AM -0800, David Boyce wrote:
> 
> You don't mention a platform so I will assume Linux.

Ah, sorry; the log was from OS X, but I had the same problem on
Linux/amd64.

> GNU make 3.81 dates from 2006, and 3.82 was released in 2010. That's a lot
> of bugfixes, so the first thing is to try at least 3.82 and ideally the CVS
> version which has ~3 more years of fixes.

OK, I'll give that a try.

> run make, and in another window run something like "pstree -a -p -l <pid>"
>
> Something else to try first would be "strace -p <make-pid>".

I'll double check this when I test with a newer make, but from memory:
On Linux, "ps aux --forest" showed no child processes, and strace
printed no output (which is consistent with make just repeatedly walking
over its datastructures and not finding anything to do, so not making
any system calls).

> These may provide useful clues. However, based on the data you provided I'd
> bet on a bug in make

Thanks; that's what I thought, but I'm not familiar enough with make to
be sure.

> and your best hope is that it's been fixed in the last
> ~7 years.

Well, ideally I'd like to find a solution that doesn't require all the
users to install a newer make. But I'll do some more diagnosis and see
what I find.


Thanks
Ian