%% Stepan Kasal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: sk> But it's sad that the vendor of the non-portable implementation sk> here is GNU.
It's NOT non-portable. There are other versions of make which do this sort of thing already. For example the version of SysV make that comes with Solaris (and probably other UNIX systems) works identically to the new behavior of GNU make: the prerequisites list is evaluated twice, so any $ that appears on the prerequisites list must be double-quoted ($$$$). sk> Alternatively, Automake could simply state that $'s in filename are sk> not portable. In fact, that is true already, and has always been true :-/. However, apparently there is no choice but to support them since Java requires it. It really confuses me how a company like Sun could create a language that is so difficult to use with standard UNIX tools. If you're going to invent a language, why not make it easy to work with? sk> I'd really like to ask you to introduce a way to switch this sk> unusual feature off, preferably with a dot-target, so that sk> portable Makefiles can be generated more easily. All things being equal I prefer not to allow whole features like this to be enabled/disabled as it makes testing, etc. more difficult. However, I'll consider doing it if there's a plausible argument to be made that the old behavior was inherently more portable than the current behavior. The new behavior is not backward-compatible so that poses its own set of problems. But, I don't think the old behavior was particularly portable either. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
