Re: Any help needed?

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Kamil Burzynski <address@hidden> writes:

  kb> On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:36:08 +0000
  kb> "J. Grant" <address@hidden> wrote:

  >> How about figuring out a backwards compatible way to deal with paths 
  >> containing spaces?

  kb> Seems nice enough for a start and getting aroung with project sources ;)

  kb> Could you please give more details about problem itself (I've
  kb> never had such problem with make - probably because I
  kb> automatically avoid such spaced-filenames on my harddisk ;D) - few
  kb> problematic examples would be nice. I'll take a look and also will
  kb> try to create such situations.

I want to warn you up-front that I think this is an extremely difficult
problem.  If you decide to take it on please be prepared to discuss the
design you choose with the developers before developing any code and
expect it to go through many iterations.  While supporting filenames
with spaces would be great to be able to do, there are just so many
issues and I'm not willing to pay _ANY_ price to provide this capability
(by that I mean that I'm willing to pay some prices, but there are also
prices I'm not willing to pay in terms of performance, backward
compatibility, code maintainability, etc.)

The other one, listed on the web site, is also very difficult.
Basically it involved changing GNU make from a stateless program into a
stateful program, with all the headaches that involves in terms of
portability, safety/locking issues, etc.


There are some other, smaller items that would be nice as well:

Preprocessor work:

  * Add an "elseif" construct

  * Add logical operators like && and ||.

Generic:

  * Rationalize the way MAKEFLAGS are handled.  It would be nice to
    ensure that, for example, adding in "r" to MAKEFLAGS takes effect
    properly.  Also it's probably good to have MAKEFLAGS parsed every
    time it's changed so that the changes take effect immediately.


Probably some others...

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