[GRASS-dev] another make problem (OSX, but could be a general problem)

[Glynn Clements]

Hamish wrote:

> I notice with the latest CVS that "g.module.tmp.html" files are left in each
> module directory after a build.

Yep. Arguably, they should be. In general, anything which could be
re-used if make is re-run should be left around until "make clean" is
run.

If the description.html files were handled consistently (some are
called description.html, some are named after the program, e.g. 
r.mapcalc.html; some are complete HTML files, some expect to be merged
with the <prog>.tmp.html file), the rule to build the final
<prog>.html file would have both fragments as prerequisites.

If you modify description.html then re-build the final <prog>.html
file, it would use the existing <prog>.tmp.html file rather than
repeating the --html-description step.

This doesn't happen at present, as there's no way to determine which
files tools/mkhtml.sh will actually use (it handles several cases
depending upon which files already exist), so description.html isn't
listed as a prerequisite. It may be useful in the future, though.

It would be easy enough to have the htmlgen step remove them if
they're causing problems. The only situation where they would be
regenerated unnecessarily is if you need to rebuild the <prog>.html
file and the program itself hasn't changed, which isn't likely.

Currently, they aren't explicitly mentioned in the Makefiles because
they aren't always created/used. A few programs don't understand
--html-description, which created no end of problems with trying to
come up with sane rules for building the HTML files.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>