Re: Detecting FreeBSD's make

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2007-11-07 at 01:00 +0000, Harlan Stenn wrote:
> IME, that position is excessive.  It was true, as far as I can recall,
> for SGI's make, but this is the first time this particular issue has
> bitten me (or any of the users of the package) in a *long* time.

Hm.  Maybe automake works around it better than it used to.

IIRC, the problem is that in SysV make (and perhaps in BSD make although
I confess I've not played with it much), a number of the normal
automatic variables are not defined for explicit rules; they're only
defined for suffix rules.  And if the automatic variables are not
defined, then you can't find out what the VPATH'd pathname is for those
files.

So, the upshot is VPATH just doesn't work with explicit rules, which is
not good.

There may have been other problems with VPATH as well.


This is from my increasingly dodgy memory so I could be wrong on
particulars.

Cheers!

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