On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:53:24PM -0600, James Chacon wrote:
  | > 
  | > Make -j is simply broken (in yet another way) - just avoid it.
  |
  | Actually I can't find other ways it's not working correctly (as long
  | as proper analysis of your Makefiles has been done and .WAIT's added
  | appropriately).
  |
  | This is fixed via adding '|| exit $?' as Ben suggested so I'll
  | probably start reviewing Makefiles for this shortly. In addition
  | the man page for make needs a much clearer explanation of the
  | implications of -j and command execution (since non-compat mode
  | is different than traditional make in this respect with all the
  | commands flowing through 1 shell instance).

Why can't this be fixed by using ``|| exit $?\n'' instead of ``\n'' as
the separator for the merged input fed to sh -e when using make -j ?

This would involve less churn of Makefiles; the current bug is being
caused due to an optimization that make -j performs that is dangerous
given the variance in -e semantics in different sh implementations,
and hacking the Makefiles to work around this issue doesn't strike me
as the optimal solution.