[bug #58735] if depending on include, gmake does not execute commands for out of date targets in the right order

[Paul D. Smith]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #58735 (project make):

I'm not sure I understand the issue being reported: an example would help.

Make works by first reading the initial makefile(s) and all (existing)
included files.  During this step it doesn't complain about missing makefiles.
 Then after that is all completed, make tries to rebuild all the makefiles
(existing or not).  If any fail to rebuild (and were not included with
"-include" / "sinclude"), then make fails.  If all were rebuilt, then make
starts over from scratch and re-reads everything.

It is true that currently (due to an implementation detail) they are built in
reverse order, as if you'd typed "make inc3.mk inc2.mk inc1.mk Makefile".  If
you have correct dependencies for your included makefiles this shouldn't
matter, but that can easily be changed so they are built in the same order
they were encountered.

Of course if you enable parallelism you really have to have correct
dependencies anyway or you can't be sure what order things will actually run
in.

Is the reverse order the issue you're concerned with?  I'm not sure what you
meant by "wrong include concept" reported in 1998.

If you mean, you think that if make encounters a missing included file, it
should stop and try to build that makefile immediately, then continue to read,
well, that's one way it could work but that's not how it works.  There are
some advantages to that, but there are also advantages to the way make works
today.  I haven't seen anything showing it would be worth the huge
backward-compatibility break to change the way make works in this respect.

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