RE: Tricky suffix rule problem for Corba

[CARTER-HITCHIN, David, FM]

Hi Paul,

I fixed the problem, with your help.

> As I said, GIVEN THE ABOVE MAKEFILE.  If it's not working, 
> then there's
> more to your makefiles than you've shown.
> 
> If the target is ../idl/a.h, then you have somewhere in your 
> makefile a
> prerequisite statement that asks make to build ../idl/a.h.

You were right.  We had a "defs" file which was generating the
targets from the idls like this:

IDL_HEADERS = $(subst .idl,.h,$(IDL_FILES))

so ../idl/a.idl would become target ../idl/a.h; my fix is:

IDL_HEADERS_TMP = $(subst .idl,.h,$(IDL_FILES))
IDL_HEADERS = $(subst ../idl/,,$(IDL_HEADERS_TMP))

There maybe a more elegant way of fixing this with one command, 
but that works beautifully!

> As I said, we don't have time to debug your entire make 
> environment.  If
> you can't describe it completely you'll have to generate a small,
> self-contained test case that shows the problem and we can 
> look at that.
> In my experience just going through that exercise will often show you
> what the problem is.

I built a small test case, and sure enough it behaved just like you said 
it would (not that I ever disbelieved you!)  Then with the help of make -p
I saw that the rule invoked was IDL: ../idl/file.h which led me to look
at the variable after the IDL rule (IDL_HEADERS) then bingo - the subst
rule was found.

> ----- Apropos of not very much, this 23-line signature is incredibly
> annoying... and legally completely useless.  The de facto standard
> maximum length for a signature is 4 lines, FWIW :-).  At the 
> very least
> please reduce the line length to 79 chars or less per line, and please
> use the universal signature introduction character sequence, which is
> dash-dash-space ("-- ") on its own line just before the sig.

The signature is automated and I have no control over it - it is appended
to every message I send.

I couldn't agree with you more on every point and I've read the RFC.  
The trouble is we are the UK's biggest financial institution, with over 
130,000 employees.  Suggesting that we change legal notices will be a 
complete waste of time for me because they will not listen to a non-legal 
person like me.  RBS is a big monolithic organsiation and the signature
would have been put in place, like every other bank has done, after legal
discussion which would not have included anyone party to such rules as 
the four line rule.  I could literally spend weeks even tracking down
the right person to speak to, let alone convincing them that it was
right to change it.

Other lists have overcome this problem (for RBS are not alone in this crime)
by looking for "--LongSig" and strip off everything after that.  It would
be easier for the maintainers of this list (or this list's software) to
adopt this practice.

Thanks again, much appreciated,


David Carter-Hitchin.
--
--LongSig


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