Re: 'make -j 2' fails on FreeBSD-10 + more FreeBSD details

[Jim Meyering]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 7:01 AM, Assaf Gordon <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>
> On 03/22/2014 08:21 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 10:36 AM, Assaf Gordon <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>
>>> One more critical difference (in building on FreeBSD-10 vs. common
>>> linux):
>>>
>>> The following contrived Makefile, works on Linux (with either GNU make or
>>> bmake), but fails on FreeBSD-10:
>
>
>> Hi Gordon,
>> That makes it look like the FreeBSD bmake invokes each line
>> using a shell with the equivalent of "set -e" in effect. That is the
>> trouble. Do they document if/how they set the SHELL environment
>> variable? You can probably cause GNU make to misbehave in
>> the same manner by setting SHELL  to something like "/bin/sh -e".
>
>
> Based on feedback from FreeBSD people:
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2014-March/256962.html
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2014-March/256943.html
>
> It would seem 'make' compatibility was never a goal.
>
> Their advice is to use 'gmake' when building 'autotools' projects.
>
> To put things in perspective,
> most 'autotools' project would still compile fine with FreeBSD make, it's
> just those few obscure cases mentioned in this thread that fail.

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for the info.
It would be great to add something to automake-generated Makefiles
that would alert users to this risk -- or that would halt the build right
away, suggesting to use gmake instead. If you feel like pursuing it,
and find that there is some POSIX-make-compatible construct we can
emit into a Makefile that will cause bmake to do one of those two things,
I can help get that into automake.