910655 - Makefile not always rebuilt from Makefile.in

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

I encountered a situation in which my changes to Makefile.in were not propagated to Makefile, even when I ran a complete ./mach build (without clobber).

I believe that the steps were the following:
1. Create new directory "foo".
2. Accidentally, run "./mach build foo/" before creating moz.build or Makefile.in - this creates a $objdir/foo/Makefile.
3. Add a moz.build and a Makefile.in.
4. Witness that $objdir/foo/Makefile does not change.

Incidentally, kudos to glandium for helping me locate/work around the issue.

Comment 1

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

I think the steps are:
1. create new directory
2. create moz.build in it
3. build somehow
4. add makefile.in
5. makefile is not refreshed.

Comment 2

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

This has been a known issue. We don't detect when a Makefile.in is added. Instead, we've relied on a moz.build changing to incur the config.status re-run. I'm inclined to leave this as-is since Makefile.in in the source tree are going away and not many people seem to run into this problem, annoying as it is.