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Your sibling poster points out a great scenario that can trigger this: mounting shared/externally modified filesystems. Just saying "timestamps are bad and can
by xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
Your sibling poster points out a great scenario that can trigger this: mounting shared/externally modified filesystems. Just saying "timestamps are bad and can cause inefficient builds" isn't compelling in itself.
For the record I definitely understand what the author is trying to point out, but I think they could be much more convincing.
- ams6110 8y agoSince the wide adoption of distributed version control systems (e.g. git), how many shops are still working on code on a shared filesystem being edited by multiple developers? I'd think the far more usual case is each dev has a copy of the code on his/her own machine, and another copy is on a build/test machine. There won't be any timestamp issues there. Make is like a lot of tools, it's simple and works well, up to a point. If your project complexity exceeds its abilities, you likely can afford something more sophisticated, since you probably have dozens or hundreds of developers anyway.
- maccard 8y agoI had a shared drive on virtualbox where I had the problem of the clocks not being in sync. There is also the fact that some other tools aren't necessarily well behaved and will dirty files, causing spurious rebuilds. For the most part though, you're right!