[ On Monday, May 28, 2001 at 16:09:54 (+0900), Takahiro Kambe wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: "Soft" make dependencies?  Was: make build problem - BIND
>
> Simply, is there any problem ignoring .depend older than Makefile?

That sounds like a good idea, at least on first glance.

Maybe there should be a wee warning printed....

It's still a bit of a chicken & egg problem though because strictly
speaking a .depend file is out-of-date if it's older than any file it
mentions....

Didn't SunOS-4's "make" have fully dynamic dependency maintenance
support?  AT&T's "nmake" certainly does.

I'm pretty sure even the Tenth Edition's "Mk" has enough mechanism to
build dynamic dependency maintenance rules.  I'm thinking of the
non-temporal dependency checking mechanism which would allow you to
re-check which includes something depends on and then only update the
list if it has changed, and of course to make the (intermediate) target
depend on the file containing the list of includes, as well as the files
specified in the contents of that list (with FOO_HEADERS=`cat foo.deps`
or perhaps dynamic mkfile inclusion)).

There may even be enough mechanism in our BSD make to do this, though
the syntax is so twisted into obscurity that I'm not sure I can figure
out how it might work....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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