make: reordering targets built within dependency constraints (to debug a makefile)

[Jonathan Nieder]

tags 314306 + upstream
quit

Hi Paul et al,

Simon Richter wrote[1]:

> after spending quite some tme debugging less-than strict dependencies
> with -j2, I thought it would be a nice addition if make were able to
> attempt to invert the order of rule execution while still respecting the
> order imposed by the dependencies. While this would not catch all error
> cases, it would be a great tool in debugging.

Likewise it might be nice to be able to pass in a seed and get
deterministically pseudo-random ordering.

What do you think?  Does this sound reasonable?  Any hints for someone
wanting to try it out?

Thanks for an interesting report and thanks for gmake.
Jonathan

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/314306