Re: [PATCH] Makefile: add and use the ".DELETE_ON_ERROR" flag

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 09:54:06PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

quoted

Just to be clear, I would be happy to drop the "oops, the tests barf if
you recompile halfway through" feature away if it made things more
robust overall (i.e., if we always did an atomic rename-into-place). I
just consider it the fact that we do clobber to be an accidental feature
that is not really worth "fixing". But if we care about "oops, make was
interrupted and now you have a stale build artifact with a bogus
timestamp" type of robustness, and "the tests barf" goes away as a side
effect, I won't complain.

..and "this behavior is really annoying on one platform we target, and
the fix is rather trivial".

Yeah, that's a fine reason, too. I'm not entirely clear on what the
problem is, though, or why this is the best solution (I expect you
probably explained it in an earlier thread/series, but if so it went in
one ear and out the other on my end).

quoted

That's a pretty big departure from our current Makefile style, though.
And I don't feel like it buys us a lot. Having a pretty generic and
typical Makefile is nice for people coming to the project (I have
noticed that most people are not well versed in "make" arcana).

I still think just doing "&& mv $@+ $@" is the simplest in this case, we
already have that in a dozen places in the Makefile, I wanted to add it
to a dozen or so more.

It's a common pattern already, I'd think if anything applying it
uniformly would make things easier to read, even if we didn't get more
portability & the ability to run stuff concurrently when you have "make"
active as bonus.

Yeah, and I'm OK with that direction, too.

-Peff