The annoyance of repeating Makefiles

[Ken Murchison]

Gary Mills wrote:
> I've noticed for some time that whenever I type `make' in the Cyrus
> source tree, it always recompiles something.  A repeated make should
> evenually stop compiling but this one never does.  The worst offenders
> are the various perl Makefiles which rebuild Makefile from Makefile.PL
> every time, instead of only doing it when it's out of date.  This

I'm not a Perl guy, so I don't know if this is necessary or not.

> causes the perl modules to be recompiled.  As well, imap/Makefile
> recreates xversion.h each time, resulting in more recompiles.

We recreate xversion.h (and imapd as a result) so we get an accurate CVS 
timestamp in imapd for version reporting.


> This behavior is annoying because I build the Cyrus software on a
> development server but then install it on other servers where there
> is no compiler and the source tree is mounted read-only.  This breaks
> `make install', which should only install things, not recompile them.
> Can this be fixed, or am I condemned to hack Makefiles myself?

A 'make install' shouldn't compile anything if all of the generated 
files already exist.  I would consider this a bug and would gladly 
accept a patch which fixes this behavior.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison
Project Cyrus Developer/Maintainer
Carnegie Mellon University