RE: suggestion: new make function

[Lawrence Ibarria]

I do agree that writing and reading are two different things (since reading 
would involve some kind of parsing and character handling). 
I'd table reading from a file until later or until there is enough support for 
that feature. 

I would also like to make the writefile interface independent of the fopen 
interface. Your ideas on how to do this will be the best approach, surely. 

  -- Lawrence


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Smith [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 8:17 AM
> To: Lawrence Ibarria
> Cc: 'David Boyce'; Tim Murphy; address@hidden; address@hidden
> Subject: RE: suggestion: new make function
> 
> On Tue, 2011-10-11 at 11:03 -0700, Lawrence Ibarria wrote:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: address@hidden [mailto:bug-
> make-
> > > address@hidden On Behalf Of David Boyce
> > > Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 2:17 PM
> > > To: Tim Murphy
> > > Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden
> > > Subject: Re: suggestion: new make function
> > >
> > > I agree with Tim and with Tim's suggested API, in particular
> > > "withfile". Involving the shell in something as basic and inherently
> > > portable as writing to a file opens up a world of portability issues,
> > > in addition to the performance and readability problems mentioned.
> > > Given that some platforms (Windows) have ARG_MAX limits and have
> > > adopted "command files" as the official workaround, a command line
> > > generator (which is fundamentally all make does) should have the
> > > native capability to create those kinds of command lines. IMHO.
> 
> My main reason for being reticent about this particular issue is it
> would be nice to include some kind of @-operator capability in GNU make
> which would mean you wouldn't need to write files directly yourself for
> the purposes of splitting very long command lines.
> 
> However, I am not adverse to adding a new function to write to a file.
> I'm not super-jazzed about the 3-argument "withfile" proposal though: I
> don't like using C fopen() option strings in a make interface.  Also I
> think reading from a file is something that needs a lot more thought;
> probably best to split that into a separate proposal.