A small update on 'make --shuffle' mode

June 21, 2022

Tl;DR

GNU Make --shuffle mode was releases as part of GNU make 4.4 \o/.

Note that --shuffle is not enabled by default. You can enable it by any of below methods whichever matches best your environment:

Run make --shuffle. For casual testing.
Export GNUMAKEFLAGS=--shuffle environment variable. For day-to-day development or distribution-wide testing. It is also a safe value for GNU make that does not yet understand --shuffle option.

Update: changed ~~MAKEFLAGS~~ to GNUMAKEFLAGS as bmake does not skip unknown options and fails. Noticed by Toralf.
Apply https://slyfox.uni.cx/distfiles/make/make-4.3.90.20220619-random-by-default.patch on top of snapshot tarball. Useful for environments where there is no easy way to pass a parameter to make or to set GNUMAKEFLAGS variable.

minor improvements

Compared to the initial patch announced as a proof of concept there is one extra change: presence of .NOTPARALLEL: directive in a Makefile now disables shuffling in that file.

It was done to accommodate rare projects that rely on execution order specified in Makefile and don’t plan to make dependencies correct in near future. The example is netpbm: https://sourceforge.net/p/netpbm/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/GNUmakefile#l110

failure examples

A few new bugs were found and/or fixed:

vim: https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/9978, https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/16531
groff: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62084
gpm: https://github.com/telmich/gpm/pull/43
gnu-efi: https://sourceforge.net/p/gnu-efi/patches/84/
cmigemo: https://github.com/koron/cmigemo/pull/29
harvid: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/178647
subversion: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4901
ocamlbuild: https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/pull/318
ghc(!): https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/8531
slang: fixed in slang-pre2.3.3-77 snapshot in 5d36d7c2410cbd640470a9c97cc544d257c64660 commit. Could not find web UI for repository.
strace: https://github.com/strace/strace/pull/215
ski: https://github.com/trofi/ski/commit/7cc1ced067bf3822ef87c323b6110f38bc0ca1b5
heimdal: https://github.com/heimdal/heimdal/pull/999
src-highlite: https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/index.php?10262
gcc: https://gcc.gnu.org/PR106162, https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2022-September/601708.html
openipmi: https://sourceforge.net/p/openipmi/patches/37/
avldrums.lv2: https://github.com/x42/avldrums.lv2/pull/22
exifprobe: https://github.com/hfiguiere/exifprobe/pull/21
x264: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/x264/-/merge_requests/114
ispell: will be fixed in 3.4.06. Could not find web UI for the repository.
mingw-w64: https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/e1b0c1420bbd52ef505c71737c57393ac1397b0a/
notion: https://github.com/raboof/notion/pull/346
jhead: https://github.com/Matthias-Wandel/jhead/pull/67
ldns: https://github.com/NLnetLabs/ldns/pull/192
bitlbee-facebook: https://github.com/bitlbee/bitlbee-facebook/pull/217
blahtexml: https://github.com/gvanas/blahtexml/pull/9
efivar: https://github.com/rhboot/efivar/pull/245
liburing: https://github.com/axboe/liburing/pull/891
angsd: https://github.com/ANGSD/angsd/pull/590
mailsend: https://github.com/muquit/mailsend/pull/165
libjodycode: https://codeberg.org/jbruchon/libjodycode/pulls/3
unbound: https://github.com/NLnetLabs/unbound/pull/1167

Nothing complicated. Just a few missing dependencies.

Give it a try!