Re: emacs floating point error during dump?

[Stefan Monnier]

> When talking about code, you rightfully insist on having the correct
> solution, not just "half correct" or "mostly correct".
> 
> Why do you settle for half-solutions with the build infrastructure?

While I completely agree that I'd prefer to have full (and auto-generated)
dependencies between .c and .h files in the makefile, the build
infrastructure has many more "incorrect" parts than that and
I doubt we will ever have a "correct" solution.  There is always
a tradeoff between convenience and excessive recompilation.


        Stefan

PS: examples that I have bumped into over the last few months:
- modifying an elisp macro will not automatically force a rebuild of all
  the .el files that make use of it.
- changing from `make' to `make CFLAGS=-DENABLE_CHECKING' does not
  force recompilation of the .o files.
- modifying `Makefile.in' will correctly cause rebuilding of `Makefile'
  but will fail to reconstruct the targets that the Makefile describes.
- upgrading libc will not automatically cause `configure' to be rerun.
- deinstalling libpng does not automatically cause `configure' to be rerun.