RE: [bug #37703] job starts before dependency

[Jay Lawrence]

Turned out to be a Makefile problem.

Deep in an included Makefile was a
        .SECONDARY:
with no pre-requisites.

As documented, this causes chain-rules to behave differently.

I had rules that went from .c->.o->.a
Then an executable that linked a bunch of these .a's together.

The scenario I was seeing was
        - build everything in parallel
        - remove one of the .a files
        - build from the root, and see the .a rebuild, the executable did not 
relink
        - invoke make again and the executable relinks

I'm still not absolutely sure why the .SECONDARY caused this behavior, but when 
I removed it make behaves perfectly.

FYI, I'm reworking a serial build that takes about 2 hours into a parallel 
build based on the methodology espoused in 
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/article/painless-non-recursive-make. So far so 
good, I have about a 20 minute hunk of it that now builds in 1 minute 30 
seconds on a 24 core machine. Non-linear, but not that far off. This product 
has been around for 20 years and we are a classic example of the badness of 
recursive builds, and we have tried to support multiple 'make' systems with a 
common set of makefiles. I've seen the light and (to quote you) am "moving to a 
portable make instead of portable makefiles". I last rewrote these Makefiles in 
1998, it is time for an upgrade.

Jay LAwrence
        
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Smith [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Sunday, July 21, 2013 12:18 AM
To: Jay Lawrence
Cc: 'Koen Van Hoof'; 'Martijn Vermaat'; address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: Re: [bug #37703] job starts before dependency

On Tue, 2013-07-09 at 10:43 -0400, Jay Lawrence wrote:
> My bad, I see that patch now, please disregard...

In your comment below you mentioned you'd tried the latest source but it still 
failed.  I believe I fixed this bug with a commit in April.  Can you reproduce 
the issue with the latest source code; for example, the
RC1 source package?

> I am seeing a very similar scenario with 3.82. 
> 
> I have also downloaded the latest source and see the same issue.
> 
> When a very complex parallel build runs, and intermediate archive is 
> generated, and some executables that depend on that archive are built 
> before that parallel job completes. If I immediately reinvoke make 
> with the same command line, it does then relink the executables.
> 
> There is no "patch" information in this bug. Can you let me know what 
> the change was so that I can verify that it is in the source code 
> release I am building?