Re: Disgusted with kbuild developers

Eric S. Raymond
2002-02-16T14:37:56Z

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:
> The graph tells you that. The only interesting case I could find is the
> negation one - some rules are A conflicts with B which makes the UI side
> much more fun

That's right. This is a CML2 require/prohibit construct. CML1 cannot
express this, and it's essential for side-effect forcing to work. Jeff's
observation about being tempted to introduce a `require' turns out actually
to be equivalent once you see how both problems generalize.

You can't deduce these constraints from graph analysis, because they're
not implicit in the if/then tree structure that is the only thing CML1
knows about.

Jeff and Alan have now almost caught up to where I was two years ago when
I realized the CMl1 formalism was inadequate.

This is going in the FAQ.
--
Eric S. Raymond