Re: make: should -j affect cwd?

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:21:55AM -0500, James K. Lowden wrote:
> 
> People who should know say the code verges on unmaintainable.  

Have a look for yourself -- I don't think the core of it is so bad.

The Sprite make was basically written in a summer, with some care taken
to use decent implementations of sane datastructures and algorithms.  And
it worked pretty well, for building the kind of projects that existed
then, with the kind of Makefiles that existed then.

When it was picked up by CSRG and used to completely rototill the BSD
build infrastructure, a lot of what had been minor convenience features
got a really major workout and the program started to Grow.  As did the
feature set, and not in a planned way, either.

If you really want to do a bunch of work to improve make, I think the
right place to start would be to look back at the CVS logs and then
ask some of the developers who've done the most work on make to
identify the parts that would be most improved by a rewrite.  With a
lot less work than writing a whole new implementation, you could probably
do quite a bit of good.

Thor