[perf] make clean problematic bashism

From: Wouter M. Koolen
Date: Wed Aug 15 2012 - 06:22:39 EST


Dear perf maintainers,

I attempted to compile perf 3.5.1 without worrying about installing dependencies first. The resulting error messages were quite helpful, and led me to install a bunch of development libraries and flex.

Unfortunately, after installing flex the build still failed, even after make clean.

The reason for this was a bunch of generated empty flex files in util/ that were not removed by make clean. They are intended to be erased, since the Makefile executes

rm -f util/*-{bison,flex}*

however, this command does not remove the files. I guess because {,} alternatives are only special in bash but the makefile is run with some other shell?

I got perf to compile now, but thought you would be interested to know about this little problem.

With kind regards,

Wouter Koolen


PS: as a side note: GNU make has the .DELETE_ON_ERROR: special target, which removes the target file when its generating command fails. This would have prevented my problem and sounds like a good idea in general. Maybe perf could make use of this feature when on GNU make?

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/