Contents

1. Introduction
2. About Forte Developer 7 dmake
3. New and Changed Features
4. Software Corrections
5. Problems and Workarounds
6. Limitations and Incompatibilities
7. Documentation Errors

 

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A. Introduction

This document contains information about the Forte[tm] Developer 7 dmake command-line tool. This document describes the new features that are included with this release, software corrections that are addressed by this release, and lists known problems, limitations, and incompatibilities. Information in this document overrides information in the manuals for this release.

Information in the release notes updates and extends information in all readme files. To access the release notes and the complete Forte Developer documentation set, go to the documentation index at file:/opt/SUNWspro/docs/index.html.

To view the text version of this readme, type the following at a command prompt:

   more /opt/SUNWspro/READMEs/dmake

To view the HTML version of this readme, go to:

   file:/opt/SUNWspro/docs/index.html

Note - If your Forte Developer 7 software is not installed in the /opt directory, ask your system administrator for the equivalent path on your system.

 

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B. About Forte Developer 7 dmake

This release of dmake is available on the Solaris[tm] operating environment (SPARC[tm] Platform Edition) versions 7, 8, and 9.

dmake is a command-line tool, compatible with make(1). dmake can build targets in distributed, parallel, or serial mode. If you use the standard make(1) utility, the transition to dmake requires little if any alteration to your makefiles. dmake is a superset of the make utility. With nested makes, if a top-level makefile calls "make", you need to use $(MAKE). dmake parses the makefiles and determines which targets can be built concurrently and distributes the build of those targets over a number of hosts set by you. See man dmake for additional details.

For information about how to use dmake, see Chapter "Using the dmake Utility" of Forte TeamWare User's Guide from Forte for Java Release 3.0 Enterprise Edition Collection, available on http://docs.sun.com. (Search on dmake.)

This release of dmake is available on the Solaris[tm] operating environment (SPARC[tm] Platform Edition) versions 7, 8, and 9.

 

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C. New and Changed Features

This section describes the new and changed features for dmake.

• Timestamps of files are compared in microseconds. Previously dmake used seconds, which could cause unnecessary rebuilding of targets.
• Improved performance, quality, and usability, as described in the following section.

 

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D. Software Corrections

1. Performance improvement.
2. Quality improvement.
3. Usability improvement.

1. Performance improvement in dmake.

   Achieved over 30% performance improvement for the case when dmake is executed nested dmake commands (4622115, 4631517).

2. Quality improvements in dmake.

   • Improved VPATH support (4504348, 4465942, 4404309).
   • Improved .KEEP_STATE support (4483221, 4504348, 4490233, 4514485).
   • Improved granularity of time comparison Timestamps of files are compared in microseconds. Previously, dmake used seconds, which could cause unnecessary rebuilding of targets. (1257407).
   • Improved the processing of dependencies. (4350661, 4358600)

3. Usability improvements in dmake.

   • Improved diagnostics in case of a corrupted archive. (4416827)
   • Improved the interface with the Java compiler included with Solaris 9. Now make.rules for javac allow environment variables. (4224949)
   • Improved the processing of the names of targets and macros. (4209588, 4279608)

 

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E. Problems and Workarounds

This section discusses known software problems and possible workarounds for those problems. For updates, check Forte Developer Hot Product News at http://www.sun.com/forte/fcc/hotnews.html.

There is no new information at this time.

 

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F. Limitations and Incompatibilities

Forte Developer 7 dmake has the following limitations:

• This release of dmake cannot work in distributed mode if the $HOME directory is not accessible from all hosts that are set as dmake build servers.
• You can use any machine as a build server as long as it meets the following requirements:
  • From the dmake host (the machine you are using to start the build process) you must be able to use rsh without being prompted for the password to remotely execute commands on the build server.
  • The bin directory in which the dmake software is installed must be accessible from the build server. By default, dmake assumes that the logical path to the dmake executables on the build server is the same as on the dmake host. You can override this assumption by specifying a path name as an attribute of the host entry in the runtime configuration file.

 

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G. Documentation Errata

There is no new information at this time. 

 

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Copyright © 2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms.