RE: File timing bug

[Herbert Euler]

Hi,

Perhaps due to my long and annoying description, one has difficulty in
understanding what the problem I encountered was.  Here I would
provide a much shorter description.

GNU Automake generates dependency tree like this in Makefile.in:

  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$ cat Makefile
  a: b
          cat b>a
  b: c
  c: d
          date>b
          cp b c
  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$

Its intention is to regenerate `a' when `d' is updated.  But this does
not work, since it requires `make' to be executed twice:

  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$ make
  date>b
  cp b c
  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$ make
  cat b>a
  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$

However, I noticed that if the Makefile looks like this:

  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$ cat Makefile
  a: b
          cat b>a
  b: c
          cp c b
  c: d
          date>c
  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$

Everything works as expected:

  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$ touch d
  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$ make
  date>c
  cp c b
  cat b>a
  address@hidden:~/tmp/k$

Is this a bug in GNU make, or a bug in GNU Automake?

Regards,
Guanpeng Xu
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