On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Roland Haas roland.haas@physics.gatech.edu wrote:

Hello all,

...

following:

make sim options=optionsfile VARIABLE=OVERRIDE

and thus override the setting for VARIABLE that may exist in  "optionsfile".

We may want to change this (and I think we should); however, there is

Should this really be changed? I find myself doing make sim options=optionsfile SILENT=NO occasionally when the make process fails for some odd reason (actually I would sometimes prefer if I could do more with this mechanism, eg. also OPTIMISE=NO when debugging). So if the possibility of doing VARIABLE=OVERRIDE on the command line is related to preferring environment variables over options file options then (at least for me) the current behaviour is the more useful one.

I think what we really want is a distinction between environment variables and additional options that are specified on the command line. It is unfortunate that the make command mixes them together. One way out would be to switch from using "make" to using a script (e.g. called "cactus") to perform the usual actions (building, configuring, etc.).

The top-level make command (the one that the user executes) don't actually use any real make functionality; it just parses the command line and then performs the corresponding action. One of these actions can be to call another make command to build Cactus; other actions are e.g. to calls latex to build the documentation etc. This top-level make command could be replaced by a different mechanism that would simplify handling command line options. For example, it could also detect misspelled (unknown) options or settings, which is basically impossible to do from within make.

-erik