Re: auto-dep cannot possibly work?

[Mike Shal]

On 11/16/09, Mark Galeck (CW) <address@hidden> wrote:
> >Mark, I applaud your goal of trying to get make to behave properly in
>  all cases. However, once you have the -I paths knocked out, does your
>  approach also work for -L and libraries? What about for programs that
>  aren't gcc? What happens when you have a Makefile that builds
>  libfoo.a, but you realize 'foo' is already trademarked so you change
>  it to 'libbar.a'? Will all those other Makefiles that still reference
>  libfoo.a report an error? Or will it silently succeed because libfoo.a
>  still exists in the filesystem, and once again leave the mess for the
>  next clean build?
>
>
>
> Well I don't know if you are being sarcastic, possibly, I don't get these 
> things, so I will assume you are not :)

No, I'm not being sarcastic. I think it is a worthwhile endeavor.

>
>  OK, for libraries, there is nothing to do for auto-dependencies. For 
> libraries, the user has to make sure -L paths are specified properly, and the 
> libraries are listed as necessary.  The developers can update the makefile as 
> needed, I only am trying to get started the include-file autodependency.

I guess here I don't see what the difference is between libraries and
headers. Surely someone could put a generic sounding "libutil.a"
earlier in the library search path. Though probably less likely, you
can rely on the user in one case but not the other?

-Mike