Re: Brittle -includes

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2019-10-16 at 08:10 +0200, David Deutsch wrote:
> My problem is that I keep running into situations where an .mk is
> -include'd as seen above, but make never attempts to... make it,
> resulting in a 'No rule to make target' error. I suspect there is some
> kind of race condition going on where it does "see" the include, but
> missing dependency error is triggered before that can occur. This
> happens consistently, no matter whether I use -j or not.

If you don't use -j, then it can't be a race condition.  Make is not
multithreaded so without -j it should be completely deterministic.  Are
you saying that _without_ -j you get nondeterministic failures?

You didn't mention what version of GNU make you're using.  Perhaps
there's a bug in that version?

Also, note that with newer versions of GNU make you don't need to use
"-include" to avoid warnings on non-existent makefiles.

I recommend you get to a sufficiently-new version of GNU make and
change all your "-include" to just "include" and see if that helps.