Follow-up Comment #5, bug #30381 (project make):
But it isn't just a matter of infinite recursion; there's a very serious
issue of performance as well, even without infinite recursion. Computing
pattern rule matches can already take quite a while: if we add more ways in
which patterns can recurse that's potentially orders of magnitude more
possible paths make has to examine and discard before it can move forward (or
give up).
There are many rules in the default database of the form "% : %.o" for
example; if we can't avoid recursing on them then they're essentially infinite
already: the idea that we can just debug these issues because they're really
rare anyway is not really true.
Yes, saying that we'd only allow recursion that resulted in a smaller file
length would help... but it seems complicated to describe. Coming up with the
changes needed to the "Implicit Rule Search Algorithm" chapter in the manual
might be a good way forward.
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