On 11/22/2011 11:18 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
is gmake stable enough or is gmake just another moving target
just like many other GNU-programs?
If you go back just three versions, you've gone back in time ~9 years.
That is about the length of time that GNU make has been the default
implementation of make everywhere but the BSDs, so if this hypothetical
rewrite happened, I think you could safely depend only on what's
available in GNU make 3.80.
The past two releases have had some backwards-incompatible changes, but
they're all by way of fixing obscure corner cases that are easy to stay
away from. Looking at the changes, I can't say I'd want them to have
kept the old behavior just for compatibility sake.
For example, see the "Pattern search changes" section of this article:
http://www.electric-cloud.com/blog/2010/08/03/gnu-make-3-82-is-out/
As long as this hypothetical rewrite used GNU make in standard ways, I
don't see that it's likely to get caught by future changes. I don't
think I've ever had a GNUmakefile fail to work after upgrading GNU make.
