Re: test10-pre7

[Peter Samuelson <peter@cadcamlab.org>]

[hpa]
> I was going to ask to what extent we genuinely need sorting, and if
> we might be better off trying to eliminate that need as much as
> possible.

We don't need sorting.  We need removing of duplicates.  The GNU make
sort function removes duplicates as a side effect, which is why we want
to use it.

As has been discussed, there are lots of ways to remove duplicates.
You can spawn a shell script, you can keep track of each "common" file
with a tristate make variable, you can play with deeply nested if
statements, and rumor has it you may be able to write a custom GNU make
function (though I have doubts, as I have tried this before and
couldn't get anything to work).

To Keith, Michael and me, the cleanest way to remove duplicates is
$(sort).  Since some object files must *not* be sorted, we came up with
a simple, readable way to declare that certain things had to come in a
certain order -- the idea being that most of the time it would not be
needed.  Linus disagrees that our solution is simple, readable or
otherwise desirable.  That's basically the whole issue in a nutshell.

Peter
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