At this point I'm not considering backing out this change. First, GNU make absolutely _IS_ an implementation of POSIX standard for make: you only have to read as far as the second paragraph in the GNU make manual:
> GNU make conforms to section 6.2 of IEEE Standard 1003.2-1992 > (POSIX.2). This doesn't mean that GNU Make must follow it blindly. Coreutils is also conformant to POSIX, but by default it isn't POSIX compliant, you have to set POSIXLY_CORRECT for it to behave like that, the same deal for bash (you have to run it as `sh' to make it behave like a POSIX shell). Standards aside; since they have little to do with this... Thanks for the detailed explanation, but the thing with the backslash/newline stuff is that it breaks old Makefiles, and it makes new Makefiles not work with old makes; it is also hard (and might make it even more unreadable than what you have now!) to make old Makefiles work with both a > 3.80 Make, and a <= 3.80 Make, which is why I'm really against this kind of change. Being forced to tell users to `you need a new make' is quite silly in my opinion. The thing is that make is a end-user command, not like autoconf, which make these types of changes a pita on the actual users. So all the benefits will be lost anyway, since developers will want to make their Makfiles work with as many GNU Make versions as possible, which will force them to jump hoops to make old code work with new versions of make. All you arguments are very solid from a technical aspect, but I'm arguing from a practial one; alas make is a end-user program, so these kind of changes usually cause more harm than good. :( Happy hacking. _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
