Re: I: adjust test suite for upcoming GNU Make 3.83

[psmith]

%% Stepan Kasal <address@hidden> writes:

  sk> But it's sad that the vendor of the non-portable implementation
  sk> here is GNU.

It's NOT non-portable.  There are other versions of make which do this
sort of thing already.  For example the version of SysV make that comes
with Solaris (and probably other UNIX systems) works identically to the
new behavior of GNU make: the prerequisites list is evaluated twice, so
any $ that appears on the prerequisites list must be double-quoted
($$$$).

  sk> Alternatively, Automake could simply state that $'s in filename are
  sk> not portable.

In fact, that is true already, and has always been true :-/.

However, apparently there is no choice but to support them since Java
requires it.  It really confuses me how a company like Sun could create
a language that is so difficult to use with standard UNIX tools.  If
you're going to invent a language, why not make it easy to work with?

  sk> I'd really like to ask you to introduce a way to switch this
  sk> unusual feature off, preferably with a dot-target, so that
  sk> portable Makefiles can be generated more easily.

All things being equal I prefer not to allow whole features like this to
be enabled/disabled as it makes testing, etc. more difficult.  However,
I'll consider doing it if there's a plausible argument to be made that
the old behavior was inherently more portable than the current behavior.

The new behavior is not backward-compatible so that poses its own set of
problems.  But, I don't think the old behavior was particularly portable
either.

-- 
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 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
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