questionable feature in FreeBSD pmake

From: Dan Strick (strick_at_covad.net)
Date: 10/28/04

  • Next message: Peter Pentchev: "Re: questionable feature in FreeBSD pmake" 
    Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 03:23:02 -0700 (PDT)
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org

    I just spent a *very* frustrating hour trying to figure out why the
    FreeBSD make program was invoking all commands to make things in a
    subdirectory named "obj". I eventually discovered this gem in the
    make man page:

        In addition, make sets or knows about the following internal
        variables or environment variables:

        ...

        .OBJDIR A path to the directory where the targets are built. At
                    startup, make searches for an alternate directory to place
                    target files. It will attempt to change into this special
                    directory and will search this directory for makefiles not
                    found in the current directory. The following directories
                    are tried in order:

                    1. ${MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX}/`pwd`
                    2. ${MAKEOBJDIR}
                    3. obj.${MACHINE}
                    4. obj
                    5. /usr/obj/`pwd`

    I believe this feature is a real botch because it is magic, unintuitive,
    and so *exceedingly* easy to invoke by mistake. It happens that I really
    really want to have a subdirectory named "obj" and I really really don't
    want to cd into it. The only workaround seems to be to define the
    MAKEOBJDIR variable and that would be disgustingly ugly because it makes
    no obvious sense unless you are aware of the magic feature. Rules 3-5
    look like they were invented without careful consideration to avoid the
    minor effort required to use one of the first 2 rules.

    Does anyone know where this feature came from? The .OBJDIR variable was
    recognized by the pmake distributed with 4.4 BSD, but the man page for
    that version of make does not mention the gratuitous magic rules for
    changing the make working directory. The older make program found in
    4.3 BSD does not seem to use the .OBJDIR variable at all.

    This feature is not mentioned in the pmake tutorial found in
    /usr/share/doc/psd/12.make. Is it a FreeBSD-ism?

    Dan Strick
    strick@covad.net
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  • Next message: Peter Pentchev: "Re: questionable feature in FreeBSD pmake"

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