Re: Makefile bug in generating mh-loaddefs.el?

[Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>
>> Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:55:24 -0700
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> Do this
>> 
>> rm src/emacs mh-e/mh-loaddefs.el
>> cd lisp
>> make mh-autoloads
>> 
>> "make mh-autoloads" will fail, now run "make mh-autoloads" again and it will
>> succeed...
>
> I think this is true for almost any other target in lisp/Makefile.

I agree with Eli. The mh-loaddefs.el rule is essentially a copy of the
loaddefs.el rule. If the mh-loaddefs.el rule needs to be fixed, all of
the rules need to be fixed.

> So generally the right thing to do is to
> delete the target file if the command fails after beginning to change
> the file.  `make' will do this if `.DELETE_ON_ERROR' appears as a
> target.

I'm not sure I'd agree with this practice. If the command fails, the
remnants of the target file could be used for troubleshooting.

Tom's approach--writing to a temporary file and moving it at the
end--seems to answer all issues.

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD