[Pkg-octave-devel] Re: [OctDev] Patch for making octave-forge buidl with GNU make 3.81

[Paul Kienzle]

Rafael,

Feel free to make changes as necessary.

You should put a comment in the Makefile about why the seemingly
pointless ;\ is there so that we don't clean it up later.

It is polite to inform the author of the file that you have
made the change.  The rest of us can pick it up from the
excellent one-line description you give when you post the update
to CVS.

Thanks,

	- Paul


On Dec 30, 2005, at 6:33 PM, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> The following bug report has been filed against the octave-forge
> Debian package:
>
>     http://bugs.debian.org/344995
>
> Joaquim Ortega has investigated the problem and traced it down to a
> change in the way GNU make version 3.81 treats multiple defined pattern
> rules.
>
> Briefly, the problem is the following: the top srcdir Makeconf defines 
> the
> following default pattern rule:
>
>     %.o: %.cc ; $(MKOCTFILE) -c $<
>
> Makefiles like main/comm/Makefile have the following:
>
>     sinclude ../../Makeconf
>     [...]
>     %.o:%.cc
>            @echo "Compiling $@"; \
>            $(MKOCTFILE) $(MOFLAGS) $(DEFINES) -c $<
>
> With GNU make 3.80 or earlier, the second pattern rule overrode the one
> defined in Makeconf.  However, GNU make 3.81 interprets these two rules
> as two unrelated rules.  Frankly, I do not undertand the rationale for
> this change in the GNU make behavior because using the semicolon should
> make no semantic difference in the rule interpretaion.
>
> At any rate, it seems that changing the second rule to:
>
>     %.o:%.cc ; @echo "Compiling $@"; \
>            $(MKOCTFILE) $(MOFLAGS) $(DEFINES) -c $<
>
> fixes the problem.
>
> I just uploaded a new version of the octave-forge package to debian
> unstable which contains a patch for fixing the above problem.  This 
> patch
> is attached below.
>
> I am a member of the octave-forge project @ SF.  If you think the patch
> below is okay, I would gladly apply it to CVS.
>
> P.S.: I am also attaching below a patch to extra/pdb/Makefile which 
> fixes a
> minor problem, namely that make clean fails in extra/pdb when Makeconf 
> does
> not exist at the top srcdir.
>
> -- 
> Rafael
> <50_make-pattern-rules.dpatch><50_extra-pdb-sinclude.dpatch>