RFR: JDK-8034199 Add 'reconfigure' target for re-creating a configuration (original) (raw)

Magnus Ihse Bursie magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com
Mon Feb 17 14:04:36 UTC 2014

On 2014-02-17 03:10, David Holmes wrote:

Presumably the right way to do this would be:

"make clean reconfigure ..." otherwise you could get some kind of weird hybrid build. I'm not sure that every change in spec.gmk, for example would force a recompile of everything that depended on something in there. But perhaps it does?

I agree. The only way we can guarantee a correct build after a configuration change is to clean the build.

Unfortunately, this seems a bit harsh, since most of the time a complete rebuild is not needed.

Ideally, we would of course be able to detect exactly what needs to be rebuilt as a result of creating a new configuration in place with different arguments, or by re-creating the same configuration due to an update of the configuration script. In practice, that's hardly doable. :-(

The compromise we have chosen is to:

  1. check in make if the configure script has been updated since spec.gmk was generated. If so, abort and request a reconfiguration. (Which will be helped by the current patch.)
  2. check in configure if there are an existing configuration in place. This can be the case either due to the user creating a new configuration with different arguments (or on a different platform using a network share etc), or due to a recreation of the original configuration, perhaps as prompted to by case 1. For this, we only generates a warning (saying that it is recommended that you run "make clean").

We could get harder about the sloppiness in step 2, and force a make clean, but I haven't heard many complaints about incorrect build results due to such changes, but I'm sure we'd hear complaints about too frequent updates to the configure files if we were to enforce a clean! :-)

Sometimes I've re-run configure with the exact same args and I get a warning about doing this over an existing configuration ?? At which point I either do a dist-clean or "rm -rf ...".

You'll get this warning everytime you run configure where a spec.gmk already exists. If you have not noticed it always, it is because you are like everyone else and do not read configure warnings. ;-)

/Magnus

More information about the build-dev mailing list