Re: GNU make 4.2.93 release candidate available

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2020-01-10 at 11:02 -0500, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> For some reason you say GNU make needs to read in the entire users
> environment? Really? OKay ... *shrug* ...

Sure; remember this:

https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Environment

> Variables in make can come from the environment in which make is run.
> Every environment variable that make sees when it starts up is
> transformed into a make variable with the same name and value.

Of course, make COULD do this differently so that instead of importing
all the variables up-front, when a variable was expanded and no other
value could be found make could look up that variable in the
environment.  But, that's not how it works.  There are other issues
like making sure the $(origin ...) function worked correctly.  And of
course, the $(.VARIABLES) variable cannot be constructed.

And finally, we still need the environment (at least for some builds)
so that we can modify it then pass it to exec(2) as the environment of
the child process.

> Meanwhile a friend and I are giving 4.2.93 a look on FreeBSD 12.0 and
> a whole slew of packages fail to build. We don't know why yet :
> 
> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=243145

That's highly concerning.  Please let me know what you find out; I'd
prefer to understand this before publishing a release.

There are some backward-incompatible changes in this release but I'd
hoped that they would not be much of an issue in real life.