[LispM-Hackers] Makefile makedepend query

[James A. Crippen]

I just did a full clean of my e3 checkout, updated everything, and
then tried to do a make.

make: *** No rule to make target `/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/2.96/include/stdarg.h', needed by `app.o'.  Stop.

That sucks.  Looking at the depend.mk I see that app.o has a *whole
bunch* of system specific stuff that it suddenly depends on.  Stuff
that is definitely *not* system independent.  Is this on purpose or on
accident?  It looks ultra bad to me.  Especially lines like:

app.o: /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/2.96/include/stdarg.h

which if you note is the source of the error I mentioned above.  I
don't have this file on my system, and I'm even using a Red Hat
install!

I don't quite understand why you need this stuff in the first place.
Is it just a mistake?

Perhaps you're trying to do something with makedepend that you should
be doing with handmade makefiles?  Particularly one thing you want to
do is avoid making the system includes a requirement for building.
There's no way make can reasonably handle this.

Instead of using makedepend which is an X11 specific program, could
you maybe use 'gcc -MM'?  I think this would do more what you want
anyway...  From the gcc info:

`-M'
     Tell the preprocessor to output a rule suitable for `make'
     describing the dependencies of each object file.  For each source
     file, the preprocessor outputs one `make'-rule whose target is
     the object file name for that source file and whose dependencies
     are all the `#include' header files it uses.  This rule may be a
     single line or may be continued with `\'-newline if it is long.
     The list of rules is printed on standard output instead of the
     preprocessed C program.

     `-M' implies `-E'.

     Another way to specify output of a `make' rule is by setting the
     environment variable `DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT' (*note Environment
     Variables::.).

`-MM'
     Like `-M' but the output mentions only the user header files
     included with `#include "FILE"'.  System header files included
     with `#include <FILE>' are omitted.

`-MD'
     Like `-M' but the dependency information is written to a file
     made by replacing ".c" with ".d" at the end of the input file
     names.  This is in addition to compiling the file as
     specified--`-MD' does not inhibit ordinary compilation the way
     `-M' does.

     In Mach, you can use the utility `md' to merge multiple
     dependency files into a single dependency file suitable for using
     with the `make' command.

`-MMD'
     Like `-MD' except mention only user header files, not system
     header files.

`-MG'
     Treat missing header files as generated files and assume they
     live in the same directory as the source file.  If you specify
     `-MG', you must also specify either `-M' or `-MM'.  `-MG' is not
     supported with `-MD' or `-MMD'.

I know that this won't work on systems that don't use GCC, but I think
we're considering GCC our current favorite compiler anyway since it's
used on everything we've ported to so far (Linux, *BSD, MacOS X,
Windows+GNU, bare iron).

Once we have to worry about multiple compilers then maybe it'll be
time for me to write a configure.in and Makefile.in and start using
autoconf and automake...

In your bare iron version, if you know where your includes are coming
from then is there a way you could just store these in a special file
instead of having to recompute them?

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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