Re: dashes in Makefile macro names

[Eric Blake]

On 01/28/2011 04:38 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Can you use $(FOO-BAR) in Makefile? It's not portable in POSIX [1]
>   "Applications shall select macro names from the set of characters
>    consisting solely of periods, underscores, digits, and alphabetics
>    from the portable character set"
> And the Autoconf manual too says that it's not portable [2].
> 
> But Paul Eggert found a number of such Makefile macro names in Emacs [3],
> which have apparently not been hurting for years.
> 
> Prompted by this, I've tested the support for Makefile macro names with
> dashes in
>   - GNU make,
>   - dmake 4.12,
>   - smake 1.2.1,
>   - the vendor 'make' in
>     - MacOS X,
>     - FreeBSD 6.4,
>     - OpenBSD 4.4,
>     - NetBSD 5.0,
>     - AIX 5.1,
>     - HP-UX 10.20,
>     - IRIX 6.5 (also pmake, smake),
>     - OSF/1 5.1,
>     - Solaris 2.6 (also dmake),

The Austin Group has asked if you would mind repeating the tests to see
if all versions of make support leading '.', '-', and digits as a macro
name.  (The POSIX standard currently doesn't forbid leading digits or
periods, but the thought was that there might be implementations that
require alphabetic or underscore as the first character, and if so, we
ought to fix the wording of the standard to call out that point at the
same time it allows dash).

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature