Hi John,
Hello! Sorry for the delay...
I read your e-mail, your blog post, the message from Paul Smith and
your patch proposal (in the link you gave sent [1]), and it seemed a
nice thing to do. The only problem is: is this really so big that
would take me two or three months to do? I know I may be
underestimating the amount of trouble I can get when changing the code
here or there, but I am really not sure that this would be so
difficult to change.
Also, I didn't understand if this is really something that should
definitely be done. Reading the bug list for the last months made me
see that some bug proposals simply receive the "won't fix" answer and
are discarded. I agree that this seems to be an interesting
improvement to make (as well as another proposal I've seem some days
ago about the "-j" option, that charges the cpu indefinitely and can
end up freezing everything -- what wouldn't be nice to me, if I'm
playing Gnomines while my program is builded), but I really need to
know if everyone agrees that someone shall do this (otherwise, I'll be
wasting my time doing something that won't be "accepted").
Anyway, I really appreciate your idea!
[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-make/2009-01/msg00035.html
--
John Gamboa
rabanetescebolas.blogspot.com <http://rabanetescebolas.blogspot.com>
Please don't forget to CC the list, as it is the only way the other
users can inform us on the importance of these ideas to them, and I can
certainly not speak for them!
You are right, this is not a 3-month long project, but I also assume
that the GNU Make maintainers have requirements that must be met for the
patch to be accepted in term of automatic unit tests and playing nice on
the different OSes, and for that I do not know how much time is
required, probably not very long but still it could be a couple of weeks.
Okay, so two more ideas:
1) Have a way for the parent to pass the value of its stem to a child rule
If the child rule knew what the parent stem was, it could utilize the
parent variables in its commands, as shown here:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/2011-07/msg00050.html
2) Improve the no rule to make target error message
A common complain with GNU Make is how dry the "no rule to make target"
error is. This message is annoying because it is like a seg fault: you
must rerun with the debug switches to be able to tell what caused the
problem, and you must also possess a PhD in Makefile-o-logy to interpret
the trace you get. If GNU Make could print a minimalistic "stack trace"
of what leads to the error and filter out all the non-relevant stuff,
this error would be more approachable for the non-make people.
Thanks for your interest!
Martin
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