Re: GNU make release candidate 3.99.90 available

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2013-05-18 at 14:00 -0400, Boris Kolpackov wrote:
> I've also tested the up-to-date check time compared to 3.81
> and the new version is significantly faster (5.63s vs 8.15s).
> That's very welcome.

There's still a serious regression in the code due to the change in
pattern rule searching added in 3.82.  In some (not that unusual)
circumstance GNU make will chew _enormous_ amounts of memory, compared
to what it used to use in 3.81 and below.

This is because in the current algorithm, every single time we do an
implicit rule search and compute possible target and dependency names
they are all added to the string cache, even if they are deemed to be
useless and not needed because that implicit rule is not chosen.  In
cases where there are lots of futile implicit rule searches the string
cache gets bloated with these useless strings.

> I would like to use the RC in more every day development, however,
> I am currently travelling and don't do much of that. So it would
> be great if you could give a couple of months for everyone to
> have a chance to test the new release thoroughly. It will also
> allow the distributions to pick it up (e.g., Debian experimental).
> This will give you essentially free testing with a wide range of
> packages.

I can't promise to wait months.  People who care should be picking this
up ASAP.  I'm looking into adding it to various automated build farms,
etc.

Also I've not seen Debian experimental pick up release candidates like
this in the past; is that something they do?

Personally I think getting into something like Gentoo may be more
beneficial since their package management tool is running make quite a
bit.