TODO comments in Makefile* and configure

[Trott]

Ref: #264

There are four TODO comments in the general build scripts for the project. It would be great to either remove them from the code (if they are no longer valid or at least not particularly high value), or get issues opened for them, or just get whatever it is they are addressing addressed. Here they are as of this writing.

• 1: Makefile:

# .buildstamp and .docbuildstamp need $(NODE_EXE) but cannot depend on it
# directly because it calls make recursively.  The parent make cannot know
# if the subprocess touched anything so it pessimistically assumes that
# .buildstamp and .docbuildstamp are out of date and need a rebuild.
# Just goes to show that recursive make really is harmful...
# TODO(bnoordhuis) Force rebuild after gyp or node-gyp update.
build-addons: $(NODE_EXE) test/addons/.buildstamp

• 2: Makefile.build:

# TODO(bnoordhuis) Make i18n support configurable.
GYPFLAGS ?= -Dv8_enable_i18n_support=0

• 3: configure:

# TODO document when we've decided on what the tracing API and its options will
# look like
parser.add_option('--systemtap-includes',
    action='store',
    dest='systemtap_includes',
    help=optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP)

• 4: And again in configure:

  icu_endianness = sys.byteorder[0];  # TODO(srl295): EBCDIC should be 'e'

/cc @bnoordhuis, @srl295

[Trott]

Whoops, submitted this too soon. I meant to wait another day or so to let any conversation in #264 run its course first. Sorry about that. (I'll leave this open though because closing it just to re-open in 24 hours or so is probably more annoying than just letting it be.)

[JungMinu]

I'd love to help 😄

[Fishrock123]

(I've numbered the 4 references in the original comment)

3 Looks like it can't actually be done any time soon.

I know enough about makefile I should be able to help on 1 if anyone wants.

[ojss]

I want to help but not really sure about where to start.

[bnoordhuis]

1 is a real issue but it's hard to fix without manually declaring dependencies on the files in tools/gyp and deps/npm/node_modules/node-gyp. Maybe it's possible to automate with .SECONDEXPANSION but that's too horrible to contemplate.

2 can be resolved by removing Makefile.build, I'm pretty sure no one uses it.

4 is a comment that can probably be removed. I don't foresee a time where we support EBCDIC systems.

[ojss]

I will fork/clone the repo and get working on them.
What about 3?

[bnoordhuis]

Seems I'm the author of that comment. I guess it can be removed, replacing optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP with a help message.

[ojss]

Okay, I removed the comment in configure and removed Makefile.build
Changes that were made can be seen on my fork of the project under branch "issue-4607"
Now for 1, I am not great with Makefiles(would love to be better).
From what I understand we need to force rebuild the system every time gyp or node-gyp gets updated. Am I correct in understanding it?

If yes, iirc we can use .PHONY or .FORCE?

[bnoordhuis]

.PHONY means make will always rebuild, which is expressly not the intent. TBH, I don't have a good suggestion for fixing 1: it's either a (large) list of static dependencies or a dynamic list + .SECONDEXPANSION. Both solutions are inelegant to say the least.

[ojss]

I see, both would be quite long..
So leave it as it is?

Also noob question, why don't we rebuild the whole thing? Isn't that better, with a fresh build I mean

[bnoordhuis]

Because it takes time. It's annoying when you're tweaking things and every 1 second change takes 30 seconds to rebuild.