Alcatel-Lucent nmake Product Builder

Metarule Closure

A metarule is a transformation rule that describes how to build a file with a name matching one pattern from a file matching another pattern. For example the following metarule, defined in the base rules, makes a .o object file from a corresponding .c source file.

%.o : %.c (CC) (CCFLAGS)
        $(CC) $(CCFLAGS) -c $(>)

Metarules are chained as needed. Given the metarules %.z : %.y and %.y : %.x and the source file file.x, the target file file.z will be generated by first applying %.y : %.x to build file.y, and then applying %.z : %.y to build file.z. Chaining is not limited to two metarules but may span several rules. Metarule closure is the process of determining what all target file patterns can be generated from what source file patterns by chaining rules together. Each metarule is closed when the rule is parsed while the makefile is being compiled.

Project makefiles may define any number of local metarules. Under some rare conditions metarules may interact with each during the closure process resulting in a loop in the chain which may cause closure to take an excessive amount of time. Starting with nmake 13 a warning is issued if closure of a metarule exceeds 5 seconds.

One way to mitigate the problem is to compile the global rules file containing the project metarules. By compiling the global rules the processing hit is taken only once up front since closure takes place when the makefile is being compiled. The local makefiles then load the compiled rules and skip the closure processing. A global rules file is compiled using the nmake -bcf flags as follows,

nmake -bcf global.mk

The above produces global.mo which can be referenced as a global makefile using the nmake -g global.mo command line option.

Note, a compiled makefile cannot be referenced using the nmake include statement in a makefile, the command line option must be used. A project build script can be used to automatically keep the global.mo updated when global.mk changes before starting a build since it won't be recompiled automatically.