I think Philip's point here is quite correct:
> That said, this does appear to be a real problem. It appears to me,
> however, that .WAIT is *not* the right solution for it, but I see no
> point in spending any brain cycles on it until a decision is made
> about what the problem is. Is it just to obtain compatibility with
> BSD make (and Sun's dmake)? Or is to actually solve a problem in
> making build setups work when using GNU make's -j flag? If the
> former, then .WAIT is a done deal and I'll shut up. If the latter,
> then some backing up and thinking about how to actually achieve the
> goal is necessary.
http://www.mail-archive.com/help-make%40gnu.org/msg06340.html
Well, I think I already made it clear that I am not looking for compatibility with BSD or Sun.
I am just trying to help parallel makes without needing to introduce ugly recursive calls to make in order to ensure sequentiality.
We seem to need one or more concrete examples of the various problems we
need so solve, and how the various proposed solutions (or new ones) do
the job. If the ONLY problem really under consideration is serializing
archive creation, it's even possible that we could handle that as a
special case (after all, archive handling is ALREADY a very special case
in make).
The issue I want to solve is not related to archive creation.
The patch I proposed was just meant to make it easier to use "make -j" safely.
Except for remarks such as "such makefile writing is bad", there was no proposal except introducing recursive calls to make.
Christophe