RE: Weird text-dependent bug in $(eval ...), simple test case

[Martin Dorey]

> completely reproducible without using $(eval)!

"How", I wondered to myself, "is Philip defining multiple rules in one line 
without using $(eval)?".  Eventually, I realized that the essence of one of the 
OP's allegations - the one we can reproduce - is that this, much simpler test 
case, demonstrates a bug:

address@hidden:~/playpen$ cat buggyMakefile 
normal normal/:;
address@hidden:~/playpen$ make -f buggyMakefile 
buggyMakefile:1: target `normal' given more than once in the same rule.
make: `normal' is up to date.
address@hidden:~/playpen$

> if you could examine why this happened in this case

I bet the other allegation - about text-dependent errors - doesn't happen 
without $(eval).  I wonder what was behind that issue, which neither Paul nor I 
reproduced.

>> both of you see buggy behaviour

I'm hoping someone will say "that's by-design for <insert reason here>".  Then 
the OP can say "OK, not a bug, but a design error", bringing us to an impasse 
where we can drop the matter.

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Philip Guenther
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2010 22:41
To: Jamie Lokier
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Weird text-dependent bug in $(eval ...), simple test case

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Jamie Lokier <address@hidden> wrote:
> Both of you have confirmed the bug - because the correct behaviour has
> no error messages, and you both got messages.  Neither of you was able
> to reproduce getting a text-dependent number of messages, but both of
> you see buggy behaviour so it's easy to reproduce a problem to investigate.
>
> Nobody wants to investigate this bug further?

Not to make an insane suggestion, but have you considered filing a bug
in the GNU bug tracking system, Savannah?
        http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/make/

As a side note, I don't understand why you call this a bug in
$(eval)...as it's completely reproducible without using $(eval)!  Did
you try testing it directly?  If not, why not?

We've seen this on the list now multiple times: it seems that if
someone first encounters a bug while working with $(eval), they report
the problem as being in $(eval) and make no attempt to reproduce it
directly.  Since this is a hinderance to getting good bug reports, it
would help if you could examine why this happened in this case so that
it might possible be avoided in the future with others.


Philip Guenther


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