Re: [PATCH] Makefile: replace most hardcoded object lists with $(wildcard)

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

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Hi Peff,

On Wed, 3 Nov 2021, Jeff King wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 02:00:42PM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>
> > I didn't notice before submitting this but this patch breaks the
> > vs-build job, because the cmake build in "contrib" is screen-scraping
> > the Makefile[1].
> >
> > What's the status of that code? It's rather tiresome to need to patch
> > two independent and incompatible build systems every time there's some
> > structural change in the Makefile.
>
> My opinion when we took in the cmake topic was that it would be OK for
> people working on the main Makefile to break cmake. It's an add-on and
> the people who care about cmake are the ones who will do the work to
> track the Makefile.

I do try to have a look at breakages in `seen` when I have the time, but
lately I didn't. That's why you may have felt more of these CMake
headaches.

> But since there's a CI job that will nag you if it fails, that kind of
> makes it everybody's problem in practice. That doesn't change my opinion
> on how things _should_ work, but I have done small fixups as necessary
> to stop the nagging.

One very simple solution is to leave the Makefile alone unless it really,
really needs to be changed. There are costs to refactoring, and quite
honestly, it might be a good thing that something like a failing vs-build
job discourages refactoring for refactoring's sake.

> > I hadn't looked in any detail at that recipe before, but it the
> > vs-build job has a hard dependency on GNU make anyway, since we use it
> > for "make artifacts-tar".
> >
> > So whatever cmake special-sauce is happening there I don't see why
> > vs-build couldn't call out "make" for most of the work it's doing,
> > isn't it just some replacement for what the "vcxproj" target in
> > config.mak.uname used to do?
>
> The big question for me is whether that really is a hard dependency.
> Obviously "make artifacts-tar" is for the CI job, but is the cmake stuff
> supposed to work for regular users without relying on having GNU make at
> all? I have no clue.

The entire point of the CMake configuration is to allow developers on
Windows to use the tools they are used to, to build Git. And believe it or
not, GNU make is not one of those tools! I know. Very hard to believe. :-)

So yeah, the vs-build/vs-test combo tries to pay attention to this
intended scenario, and avoids using GNU make or any other of those Unix
tools that much less ubiquitous than some might want to believe.

Ciao,
Dscho