Re: [bug #56701] Do not allow -j without a number

[Robert Pluim]

>>>>> On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 08:35:15 -0400 (EDT), "Paul D. Smith" 
>>>>> <address@hidden> said:

    Paul> Update of bug #56701 (project make):
    Paul>               Item Group:                     Bug => Enhancement      
      

    Paul>     _______________________________________________________

    Paul> Follow-up Comment #1:

    Paul> Actually -j without a number is useful: it's used in conjunction with 
the -l
    Paul> option to allow parallelism to be limited by system load rather than 
an
    Paul> explicit number of outstanding jobs.

    Paul> I implemented a change which requires the -l option to be provided if 
-j is
    Paul> given without an argument, else you get an error.

    Paul> However that's a large backward-compatibility change so I'm not sure 
about it.
    Paul>  Just as an example, I had to modify quite a number of tests in the 
GNU make
    Paul> regression test suite after making this change.  Of course, it's quite
    Paul> reasonable to say that the usages in the regression test suite are not
    Paul> appropriate to "real world" usages.

    Paul> I'll need to think about this.  If anyone has opinions on whether 
this would
    Paul> be a good change and/or how much breakage it would cause please let 
me know.

    Paul> I'm changing this to an enhancement because the current behavior is 
(a)
    Paul> documented, (b) useful, and (c) how make has worked for 30+ years.  
The
    Paul> question is can we find a way to avoid the downsides, and is the cost 
in
    Paul> backward-compatibiity worth it.

Please donʼt do this. When I type 'make -j', I mean it. If I get it
wrong and kill my box, thatʼs on me, make should not be handholding
here.

Robert