Re: Are prerequisites made in deterministic order when parallelism is disabled?

[David Boyce]

I've been waiting for Paul to show up with the definitive word but he may be away. I'm 95% sure he's spoken on this before with the gist of it being "While not required by standard, GNU make has always worked left-to-right and this will not change".

While I *think* I've correctly channeled his answer, the real thing could probably be found in the archives of the help-make or bug-make mailing lists if you want to search there.

David

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 7:36 AM, Brett Stahlman <address@hidden> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:00 AM, Edward Welbourne
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Brett Stahlman (13 June 2017 17:33)
>> I don't see anything in the Make docs that guarantees prerequisites
>> will be processed in left to right order. Opinions on the web seems to
>> be split into 2 camps:
>>
>> 1. Make always builds dependencies in left to right order, but a
>>    well-designed Makefile won't rely upon it.
>> 2. Make is free to build dependencies in any order it likes, provided
>>    it respects the stated dependencies.
>>
>> My own recent experience suggests #2 is the correct statement, but I
>> can't rule out the possibility that a bug in my Makefile is producing
>> the apparent non-determinism I'm observing. At any rate, can anyone
>> point me to a definitive source on this?
>
> I suspect most implementations of make do in fact build in left-to-right
> order but none guarantee it; and I won't be surprised if GNU make used
> to but has lately stopped doing so, although I can't give you a
> definitive source either way.  I certainly wouldn't ever assume
> deterministic build order; if one prerequisite needs to be built before
> another, the make-file should express that via a dependency (perhaps
> just an order-only one).

Makes sense. I saw it suggested somewhere that Make has to perform a
complex, inherently unstable, topological sort, which may make it
difficult to preserve left to right order. By experimentation, I
discovered that the order seemed to be affected by the actual target
names: e.g., names such as "foo" and "foo22222" produced left to right
order, whereas "foo2" did not. For the vast majority of target names
tried, the order was strictly left to right.

Thanks,
Brett S.

>
>         Eddy.

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