Whoever wrote the fucked up dependency checking in javac, and didn’t provide a way to turn it the fuck off.
I’m really sick and tired of having javac deciding that it needs to recompile something 3 directories ago in spite of the fact that both the jar file and the class file that it made about 3 seconds ago are in the CLASSPATH. This seems especially bad on directories that are NFS mounted, but if there is any clock skew between the NFS server and the NFS client, it’s less than a second and those source files haven’t been touched in weeks or months. It means that every time a low level class gets a new dependency, you have to modify the CLASSPATH in every fucking Makefile in the system because maybe, just maybe, javac will decide it needs to recompile that class for no apparent reason.
And don’t tell me “just switch to ant”. I have another rant building up against how ant and eclipse cause developers to forget everything they’ve ever known about partitioning of code and they start putting in calls to higher level stuff in low level code and causing circular dependencies.