strange buildworld failure

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Sat, 24 Nov 2012, Nikos Vassiliadis wrote:

> On 11/24/2012 1:45 PM, Dimitry Andric wrote:
>> On 2012-11-24 03:38, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hmm, buildworld is supposed to be parallel-make-safe.
>>> Perhaps a full log of the failing buildworld (e.g., with script(1)) could
>>> be posted for analysis?
>> 
>> Well, either a full log, or the tail of the log, as long as it contains
>> the actual command(s) that failed.  Sometimes it can help to search
>> backwards with less, or your favorite editor, for the string "error:",
>> or if there is no such string, searching for other problem indicators.
>> 
>> Also, copies of make.conf and src.conf are often essential in finding
>> the cause of the problem.  Many build issues are caused by erroneous
>> settings. :)
>
> By the way, I tried to add some debugging info with the help of make -d A
> or -d g2 but the amount of logging was excessive(the build was ran in a tmux
> terminal and the tmux process was using more CPU time than the build itself,
> so I canceled). What should I use with "make -d" in order to get some basic
> debugging? Or is there another way?

Most cases I know of where a parallel make fails and a serial make 
succeeds are due to incomplete specification of dependencies.  This can 
usually be chased down with just a build log, without extra debugging 
information.  I have only needed to resort to the make debugging outputs 
when doing more interesting things like custom suffix rules or using the 
SRCS+OBJS magic provided by the system makefiles in unusual ways.

-Ben Kaduk