Strange problem with make (or bash?) under cygwin

[Kate Ebneter]

Folks,

I have a frankly bizarre problem using make under cygwin. The short and 
sweet description of the problem is that sometimes, the compiler or 
other tool being called by make is passed an empty command line. I 
don't know if the problem is in make, the shell, or the compiler(s) 
(although I consider them an unlikely culprit).

The longer description of the problem: We're running cygwin (1.5.9) on 
Windows XP and Win2K. We use GNU make, the latest cygwin version 
(3.80-1), in unix mode. The shell is bash (latest cygwin version). The 
toolset is a bit odd -- we use ARM's cross-compiler and assembler. Our 
build consists of about 7000 files -- not huge, by any means. We run 
continuous builds, so that a build gets kicked off every time someone 
checks in. Sporadically, the build fails, and inspection of the build 
logs reveals that the compiler is complaining about a "command with no 
effect"; occasionally the culprit is the assembler, complaining about 
"No input file." In both cases, it appears that the tool is being 
passed a blank line as its argument. It's hard to tell if make is 
generating a blank command or whether the shell is screwing up. I did 
set make to echo each command as it executes, and in all cases make 
itself echoes a complete command line, but whether or not that is 
actually what it passes in its buffers to the shell, I don't know. 
Sometimes the problem occurs after we've been running for a long time; 
other times, I've seen it occur on the first build right after a 
reboot. One of my engineers says that he occasionally sees the problem 
when WinCVS is open on the tree being built, but this is not an issue 
on our build machines.

I'm pretty much tearing my hair out here. If anyone has any suggestions 
as to how we might tackle this problem -- things we might look for, 
possible causes? -- I'd love to hear them.

Thanks,

Kate Ebneter
Build Engineer
Apple Computer, Inc.
kebneter@apple.com


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/