Re: make: should -j affect cwd?

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> I think the reason make has turned into a horror - to the extent it
>> has, of course - is the ancillary facilities.  [...]  They are the
>> least amenable to theoretical consideration, because the problem
>> they are solving is difficult to codify theoretically - it is
>> fundamentally a human-interface problem.
> That's not entirely true. It's a language design issue, for which
> there's a substantial body of established knowledge.

It's a language-design issue - but the real problem isn't designing a
language to achieve certain codified goals.  It's deciding exactly what
the goals we want the language to achieve are, deciding what they are
to sufficient precision that we can apply language-design theory and
engineering practice.  That's why make keeps getting twoken: because
people keep noticing things it doesn't do the way they want, desires
which haven't yet (at that point) been taken into account.

> The problem is that make was written (and continues to get extended)
> without regard to any of that knowledge.

Well, that doesn't help.  But, until we solve the "what do people
really want from make?" problem, we can design until we're blue in the
face and the requirements will change next week, next month, whenever,
and we'll have to start over.

_That_ is why the theory is not of much use here: the problems it
addresses are not the really hard ones.

> However, m4 is crazy and I for one would rather stay away from it.

m4 is great...for a few things.  I agree it is definitely a wrong
answer here, quite aside from the things that would require hooks into
its innards to do (like $? and $>).

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