Missing feature

[Wessel, Jason]

Attached is a patch against the latest CVS to add the function
updatecache.

Attached is also an example of a batching compiler script.

The idea here is to use a rule to collect a series of files together in
a variable and pass them all to the compiler at once.

I ran into the problem that the standard make 3.80 was not able to
update the time stamps of targets that did not have a direct dependency
of a rule.  I would like to get this feature added to gnu make or learn
of another way to do the same thing if it is possible another way.

The example from the example_batch is as follows.

% touch b.h ; make all
***building***: Batched a.c b.c c.c
g++ a.c b.c c.c
Building TARGET dummy_exe with: a.o b.o c.o
% touch b.h ; make all
***building***: Batched b.c c.c
g++ b.c c.c
% touch b.h ; make all
***building***: Batched b.c c.c
g++ b.c c.c
Building TARGET dummy_exe with: a.o b.o c.o
% touch b.h ; make all
***building***: Batched b.c c.c
g++ b.c c.c
% touch b.h ; make all
***building***: Batched b.c c.c
g++ b.c c.c
Building TARGET dummy_exe with: a.o b.o c.o 


You can see that without the patch my dummy_exe is only built every
other time because the dependencies time stamps are not able to be
updated after the build rule has been processed.

Thanks,
Jason.
 <<func_updatecache.patch>>

example_batch.tar.gz
Description: example_batch.tar.gz

func_updatecache.patch
Description: func_updatecache.patch