Re: make 3.80 works, make 3.81 only works with SHELL=

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2007-04-25 at 23:05 -0400, Marty Leisner wrote:
> There's a line 
> SHELL="/bin/sh"
> in the makefile...

This is illegal.

Make is not the shell; it does not strip quotes like the shell does.
Quoting is not "harmless" in make.  These two variables:

        FOO = A
        BAR = "A"

are very different; FOO is set to the single character string A, while
BAR is set to the three character string "A".

For SHELL, if you set it to /bin/sh then make will invoke /bin/sh to run
commands, which will work.  If you set SHELL to "/bin/sh", then make
will try to invoke the command "/bin/sh" (including the quotes), which
of course doesn't exist.

Now, in reality neither make 3.80 or 3.81 does precisely the right thing
here; however, 3.81 is closer to what should happen: the command should
fail to run at all unless you have created the program "/bin/sh" on your
system (including the quotes).

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
 http://www.gnu.org                      http://make.paulandlesley.org
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist