/ 
test-1.50-101018b
/ makepp_incompatibilities

NAME

makepp_incompatibilities -- Incompatibilities between makepp and GNU make

DESCRIPTION

Makepp was designed to be as close as possible to GNU make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/). However, because of the difference in philosophy (see makepp_build_algorithm), some of GNU make's or POSIX make's (http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/make.html) features cannot be supported. A few have not been implemented because we haven't had time. Most of the differences from GNU make are quite technical and only rarely cause problems.

Forcing more POSIX or GNU make compatibility

Here are some command line possibilities for getting many legacy build systems to work without modification. They cause makepp to emulate GNU make's behavior precisely.

Compatibility via the option: --build-check=target_newer

By default, makepp will attempt to rebuild all targets if any of the dependencies have changed since the last build, or if the command has changed (see makepp_build_check for details). This is normally what you want. Sometimes, however, you don't want the target to be rebuilt if it has been modified apart from the control of makepp (e.g., by editing it, or by running a program manually to make the file). You can force makepp to use the traditional make algorithm, which only rebuilds if any of the targets are newer than the dependencies, by adding this option to the command line.

Compatibility via the option: --last-chance-rules

Default rules (pattern rules with no pattern dependencies) are not normally supported. Makepp instantiates all rules based on the existing files, so that it is aware of every file that could be generated. Alas this way it does not know how to instantiate a pattern rule with no pattern dependency. The :last_chance mechanism partially remedies that. Where this is good enough for legacy makefiles, this option allows turning it on globally.

Compatibility via the option: --no-warn

This one doesn't improve the result. Makepp will give warning messages for many things which the traditional unix make accepts without flinching. This is because there are better ways to do them with makepp. If these warnings annoy you, you can turn them off with this option.

Compatibility via the option: --traditional-recursive-make

Recursive invocations of make are often considered to be an unsafe practice (see "Better system for hierarchical builds" in makepp for details), but they are extremely common in existing makefiles. Makepp supports recursive make for backward compatibility; for new makefiles, it is much better to use the load_makefile statement, or makepp's implicit makefile loading mechanism.

In order to be able to use repositories for variant builds, and to help make recursive invocations of make safer, makepp normally does not actually invoke itself recursively even if you tell it to. Instead, a subprocess communicates with the parent process, and the actual build is done by the parent process.

This works in most cases, but there are a few incompatibilities. (All of these incompatibilities are removed by adding this option to the command line.)

  • You may not invoke several makefiles from the same directory, e.g., the following will not work:

    target: dependencies
	$(MAKE) -f other_makefile targets

    However, this will work:

    target: dependencies
	cd subdir && $(MAKE) -f other_makefile targets

  • Changes in environment variables are not passed to the recursive make process; the environment of the parent is used instead.

  • The MAKEFLAGS variable is not set up, and altering it has no effect.

This may seem like a long list of restrictions, but many makefiles obey them. For example, as far as I know, all makefiles produced by automake follow these restrictions.

All of these restrictions go away if you add the --traditional-recursive-make option to the command line, but that has the following undesirable side effects:

  • Recursive makes do not execute in parallel, even if the parent does.

  • Recursive make processes do not know anything about repositories.

  • Each recursive make process produces its own log file, in the directory it is invoked in, instead of producing one log file for the entire build. If you run it multiply in the same directory, it will overwrite the previous log file. If you have several sub-makes running in the same directory at the same time, the log file will be more or less corrupted.

Even with the --traditional-recursive-make option, the environment variables MAKEOVERRIDES and MFLAGS not set up, and are ignored, so makefiles that depend on those will not work.

Compatibility without the option: --jobs=n

Legacy makefiles will sometimes not list all dependencies, relying on the order of execution to make them in time. In this situation makepp may manage to call a rule before its dependencies have all been made. Then results may be better with less, or even no parallel execution.

Compatibility via the variable: makepp_simple_concatenation=1

Rc-style substitution is the default way makepp performs variable substitution into text strings because it very rarely breaks legacy makefiles and is often useful in new makefiles. However, it does introduce occasional incompatibilities in the substitution of variables not surrounded by spaces. For example,

INCLUDE_PREFIX := -I/some/include/dir -I
INCLUDES := $(INCLUDE_PREFIX)/other/include/dir

will set INCLUDES to -I/some/include/dir/other/include/dir -I/other/include/dir if rc-style substitution is enabled, whereas GNU make would set it to -I/some/include/dir -I/other/include/dir.

There is also an incompatibility in the handling of whitespace in a variable:

null :=
T := -o $(null)		# T contains -o followed by one space.
OUTFILE = $(T)outfile

will set OUTFILE to -ooutfile if rc-style substitution is enabled, whereas GNU make would set it to -o outfile.

Both of these incompatibilities are removed by setting the makepp_simple_concatenation variable. Note, however, that even with makepp_simple_concatenation, makepp still treats whitespace incompatibly in some situations:

T := -o # Don't delete this comment.

GNU make sets T to contain -o followed by a space, whereas makepp strips out the trailing space anyway. If you want the trailing space, you must set makepp_simple_concatenation and also set T using the technique involving a dummy variable such as null, as shown above.

Compatibility via the variable: makepp_percent_subdirs=1

By default, % in a pattern rule does not match directories. This means that a rule like this:

%.o: %.c
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $(input) -o $(output)

will not be applied to files like ../shared/xyz.c. If you want it to match files in subdirectories too, then set the variable makepp_percent_subdirs=1 on the command line or near the beginning of a makefile.

Compatibility via the environment variable: $MAKEPP_IGNORE_OPTS

Sometimes legacy recursive invocations pass options that makepp doesn't understand. Hopefully the option is not important, but it prevents makepp from running. With this environtment variable you can ask makepp to silently ignore certain options. The value shall be a space separated list of options, which can come in 4 variants:

--long=x

A long option that expects an argument. This fact must be declared through the equals sign, though the actual use may also separated by whitespace, either --long=bla or --long bla.

--long

A long option without an argument.

-sx

A short option that expects an argument. This fact must be declared by adding something directly after the option, though the actual use may also separated by whitespace, either -sbla or -s bla.

-s

A short option without an argument.

E.g. override makepp's -R option by one without an argument and accept gmake's debug option with an argument:

export MAKEPP_IGNORE_OPTS='-R --debug=x'

Incompatibilities that require Makefile changes

  • Makefiles that explicitly call make prevent makepp from building everything itself. Alas Perl's own ExtUtils::MakeMaker commits the second of the following two forms of this mistake upto version 6.56 (Perl 5.12.1):

       subdir:
	cd subdir; make

   MAKE = make

  • The VPATH variable is currently ignored. vpath statements are unsupported and will cause errors. Use repositories (see makepp_repositories) instead.

  • A pattern rule present later in a makefile overrides one that is present earlier. This is backwards from GNU make.

  • The set of builtin implicit rules (see makepp_builtin) is somewhat different from those for GNU make, though the variable names are largely compatible. The builtin rules should successfully compile C/C++/Fortran programs, and in fact may be able to guess the proper libraries in some cases too. Support for Modula-2 and RatFor and other rare languages is deliberately not present, because I kept running into problems with GNU make's rules when I accidently reused the extensions for those languages.

  • An action prefix of + is silently ignored.

  • Archive members are not supported, and neither are the associated automatic variables $%, $(%D), and $(%F).

  • There is no SCCS support.

  • Leading and trailing whitespace in variable assignments is ignored (even if the whitespace is followed by a comment). For more details on whitespace handling incompatibilities, see "Whitespace in variables" in makepp_variables.

  • Whitespace in variable names is not supported. Neither is beginning a variable name with a numeral. Words with spaces after them (and no colon on the line) are pre- or user-defined statements like

    export VAR := value		# Not a rule colon
override global VAR = value
repository dir=otherdir

    and spaces in expressions delimit a pre- or user-defined function like

    $(basename filenames)
$(dir filenames)
$(firstword words)

  • Makepp does not attempt to rebuild files included with the include statement unless the makefile contains a rule for building them before the include statement is seen. (It will attempt to rebuild the makefile itself, however.) This is normally used for handling include file dependencies, and is not as useful with makepp since you don't need to do that anyway.

  • The SHELL variable is currently partially ignored. Makepp always uses /bin/sh unless /usr/xpg4/bin/sh or /sbin/xpg4/sh is found or unless you export the SHELL variable in your makefile. But if you do, the command parser might not fully understand what your shell command does. On Windows Strawberry or ActiveState Perl you must instead set your SHELL variable before calling makepp.

  • Dependencies of anything on the Makefile still work, but are usually unnecessary. This is usually used to force a rebuild when compilation options change. Makepp knows when build commands have changed without anything special in the makefile; it stores this on a file-by-file basis. If you change the makefile, it knows exactly which files need recompilation.

  • Intermediate files are not deleted. (Because makepp insists on having all of the file dates be the same as they were on the last build, intermediate files must all be present or else rebuilds will occur.) There is no special status accorded to intermediate files.

  • The only special target that is supported is .PHONY and partially .SUFFIXES. The remaining are simply ingored.

    Specifically, GNU make has the following special targets:

    .SUFFIXES

    Makepp ignores .SUFFIXES except for the special case of .SUFFIXES with no dependencies, like this:

    .SUFFIXES:

    which tells it not to load any of its default rules.

    .INTERMEDIATE, .SECONDARY, .PRECIOUS

    No special status is accorded to intermediate files and so these targets are not meaningful.

    .IGNORE

    This target is ignored. If you want to ignore errors, put the word ignore_error (or a minus sign) in front of the command whose exit status is to be ignored.

    .SILENT

    This target is ignored. If you want commands not to echo, put the word noecho (or the @ character) in front of the command which is not supposed to be echoed, or use the --silent option to makepp.

    .DELETE_ON_ERROR
    .EXPORT_ALL_VARIABLES
    .NOEXPORT
    .POSIX
    .DEFAULT

    These targets are not supported and are simply ignored.

  • The GNU make functions eval, flavor and value are not currently supported. You can achieve the same thing as eval in a more straight-forward way with $[...] variable or function expansion.

  • Double colon rules are not fully supported. (They cannot be: in makepp's paradigm, there cannot be more than one way to update a target.) Currently, each successive double colon rule for a given target simply appends its command string and dependency list to the command string and dependency list for this target. For example, if you write this:

    a :: b
	&cat b -o a

# Later in your makefile:
a :: c
	&cat c -o >>a

    it is exactly the same as if you had written

    a : b c
	&cat b -o a
	&cat c -o >>a

    This is certainly not what double colon rules are intended for, and it will not always work, but it does work for targets like clean or for all the stuff that ExtUtils::MakeMaker puts into its makefiles. Don't count on it for anything other than legacy makefiles.

  • The $(wildcard ) function matches not only files which exist, but also files which do not yet exist, but which have a rule which makepp has seen at the time the $(wildcard ) function is evaluated.

  • The define statement is supported, but handling of @ preceding it is done differently. Currently in makepp, @ in front of a variable which has a multi-line value will only suppress echoing of the first line. For example,

    define echo-lines
&echo line1 -o $@
&echo line2 -o>>$@
endef

x:
	@$(echo-lines)

    will not suppress printing of &echo line2 as it does in GNU make; it will only suppress printing of &echo line1.

  • Makepp does not support the following environment variables (it does not set them up, and it just ignores them):

    MAKEOVERRIDES
    MFLAGS

Incompatibilities in order of expression expansion

  • Makepp expands function arguements before splitting them on the comma. So this does not work:

    expr = a,b,c
&print $(subst b,B,$(expr))	# prints "a", the 3rd argument

  • In makepp, rule actions are expanded before all of the dependencies are guaranteed to have been built. You can work around this by changing rules such as this:

    foo: bar
    genfoo < $(shell cat bar)

    to this:

    foo: bar
    genfoo < `cat bar`

    or this, which will make the file during the expansion:

    foo: bar
    genfoo < $(&cat $(make bar))

    This is preferable here, because the file listed in bar is also a dependency of this rule, and makepp can now catch it when parsing the redirection.

  • Though I have not seen this used, GNU make allows the following:

       colon = :
   a$(colon) b
	echo $^

    Makepp expands $(colon) too late for this to work. However it offers the alternative $[colon] syntax, which can do much more than GNU make, because it is expanded very early.

Command line incompatibilities

Makepp supports a few of make's more useful command line options. The following, however, are not supported:

-d or --debug
-i
-l or --load-average or --max-load
-m

Makepp's -m option has to do with signature method selection, whereas GNU make ignores -m.

-p or --print-data-base
-q or --question
-R or --no-builtin-variables

Makepp's -R option actually does something completely different.

-S --no-keep-going or --stop

The --stop option stops (puts to sleep) makepp after learning all the rules, so you can continue editing.

-t or --touch
-w or --print-directory

This happens automatically.

--warn-undefined-variables

Some of these can be easily supported if anyone cares.