[U-Boot-Users] [PATCH] Fix/workaround broken dependency handling with make 3.81

[Wolfgang Denk]

In message <20060828165250.6ad2c6c3 at cad-250-152.norway.atmel.com> you wrote:
>
> > I'm sorry, but you're addressing the rong end of the problem here.
> > Please submit a bug report to the make folks, and try to fix make.
> 
> If it's truly a bug in make, sure.

Any "make" gurus around to comment?

> %: %.o $(LIB)
> 
> This target matches absolutely anything, and it's not clear from the
> make documentation that this is a valid rule. In fact, a target which
> consists only of "%" has a special meaning, as explained in "10.6
> Defining Last-Resort Default Rules" in the make manual. It does say
> that a "catch-all" rule should have no prerequisites, however, so I
> could be wrong about this.

Section "Overriding Part of Another Makefile" has an example with  %:
which looks not too much different to what we do.


I can accept to get error messages in case of Makefile errors, but  I
think  no  matter  what is wrong ion the Makefile it should never (a)
just silently do something wrong without even a warning, and (b)  the
behaviour of Make must never depend on the order in which targets are
given  -  this  alone  is for me a pretty strong hint that there is a
make bug.

> > On the other hand you lose the ability to have different settings for
> > SREC and BIN targets.
> 
> What kind of settings? I didn't see anything special in the existing
> makefile.

I might want to build foo, foo.srec and foo.bin,  but  only  bar  and
bar.srec (no bar.bin), or baz and baz.bin (no baz.srec).

> Sure, if the tool indeed is broken. Now, it's your turn to say what you
> think `make' is doing wrong ;)

It refuses to do what I tell it. That's a major offense ;-)

Seriously: the make result must never depend on the  order  in  which
targets are given; and if there is a bug in the Makefile, I expect to
see a (helpful) error message instand of random behaviour.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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