Re: GNU Make 4.2 Query

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2019-09-01 at 23:23 -0700, Kaz Kylheku (gmake) wrote:
> If your R&D team would allow you to add just one line to the
> legacy GNU Makefile to assign the SHELL variable, you can assign that
> to a shell wrapper program which performs command re-trying.

You don't have to add any lines to the makefile.  You can reset SHELL
on the command line, just like any other make variable:

    make SHELL=/my/special/sh

You can even override it only for specific targets using the --eval
command line option:

    make --eval 'somerule: SHELL := /my/special/sh'

Or, you can add '-f mymakefile.mk -f Makefile' options to the command
line to force reading of a personal makefile before the standard
makefile.

Clearly you can modify the command line, otherwise adding new options
to control a putative retry on error option would not be possible.

As for your NFS issue, another option would be to enable the .ONESHELL
feature available in newer versions of GNU make: that will ensure that
all lines in a recipe are invoked in a single shell, which means that
they should all be invoked on the same remote host.  This can also be
done from the command line, as above.  If your recipes are written well
it should Just Work.  If they aren't, and you can't fix them, then
obviously this solution won't work for you.

Regarding changes to set re-invocation on failure, at this time I don't
believe it's something I'd be willing to add to GNU make directly,
especially not an option that simply retries every failed job.  This is
almost never useful (why would you want to retry a compile, or link, or
similar?  It will always just fail again, take longer, and generate
confusing duplicate output--at best).

The right answer for this problem is to modify the makefile to properly
retry those specific rules which need it.

I commiserate with you that your environment is static and you're not
permitted to modify it, however adding new specialized capabilities to
GNU make so that makefiles don't have to be modified isn't a design
philosophy I want to adopt.