Re: notes about make docs p 3.5

[Dmitry]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 12:46 AM Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org> wrote:

> Maybe if you described the thing you were trying to accomplish or
> understand, and what about the documentation made this difficult, we
> could come up with a practical example or improve the documentation.

Yes, I totally agree with you about : "show useful things that people might
want to do in the make manual examples". And must confess that my example
more theoretical than practical.
My goal in reading this documentation was to get a deep comprehension in make
because I want to understand big and complex build system for openwrt
distribution.
And this chapter was full of confusion for me.
I think that information in this chapter is advanced and it's
difficult to understand it
after reading only several pages. I just wanted to figure out how make
reread  it's
current makefile and how variable MAKE_RESTARTS behaves (moreover in some
lines below it said that makefile can be created from nowhere ).
So maybe my example is not very practical, but it helps to understand
how make works.
What about timestamps and infinite rebuilding - these are not the
questions that I cared too much about.


> It's not that it's only possible from RCS or SCCS per se.
> It's that make only has built-in rules that know how to check out a
> makefile from RCS and SCCS.

After reply at SO - I've understood that "It's not that it's only possible
from RCS or SCCS per se."
But in 3.5 it's totally mystified. You just can't make a guess about
such behaviour and only in RCS/SCCS .

> So, it's unlikely that there will be a desire to add built-in rules for
> more kinds of source control systems.  Probably this paragraph could be
> reworked or even mostly removed.

Yes, I think too that deleting this paragraph will be useful.

--
  Dmitry