Re: Behaviour when using both "--dry-run" and "--always-make" together

[Johan Persson]

On 2021-06-02 00:56, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Johan,
>
>     make --dry-run --always-make
>
> I'm somehow amazed these two options work together at all. They seem
> mutually unintelligible. In any case, it's the first time I've heard of
> this, so I don't have a best (or any) practice to suggest. Sorry.
> Maybe someone else here has some ideas.

Thanks for the reply. It turs out that things are even a bit worse.
I realized that it is actually enough to just have the "--always-make"
option in order to throw make into an endless loop with autotools
generated makefiles.

To avoid any issues that might exist in my setup I tried this by
rebuilding "make" itself from source from a couple of different versions
including the latest 4.3 version of make.

Some older versions of make (e.g. make v4.0) have different types of 
issues
with "--always-make" which makes it fail in slightly other ways but all
versions displays this looping behavior.

So I beleive the conclusion here is that "--always-make" is not really 
compatible
with autotools at the moment (or perhaps self-referential makefiles in 
general?)

/J