Hi, Werner asked me to answer this.
Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Pascal Stumpf drew my attention to the fact that the following line > in the top-level Makefile.in is causing trouble: > > MAKE_K_FLAG=`case "$(MAKEFLAGS)" in *k*) echo ' -k ';; esac` > > The problem is that *any* k character anywhere in MAKEFLAGS, > for example coming from something like > > make ... FOO=k ... > > is mistaken for a -k flag, forcing some parts of the build to > ignore errors even when that is not desired, making errors harder > to spot. Indeed. The test Makefile found in http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.68/html_node/The-Make-Macro-MAKEFLAGS.html confirms what you say. Makefiles generated by Automake use this idiom: for f in x $$MAKEFLAGS; do \ case $$f in \ *=* | --[!k]*);; \ *k*) keepgoing=yes;; \ esac; \ done; \ > Pascal found > > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2006-01/msg00075.html > > but we don't quite understand the reasoning given there, as > both BSD make and GNU make pass down -k to recursive make > child processes anyway, without doing anything special. > > So it seems one could just remove MAKE_K_FLAG completely > without any adverse effect I cannot confirm what you say. With GNU make, I get: $ cat Makefile MAKE_K_FLAG=`case "$(MAKEFLAGS)" in *k*) echo ' -k ';; esac` all : echo MAKE='$(MAKE)', MAKEFLAGS='$(MAKEFLAGS)' $(MAKE) $(MAKEFLAGS) foo $(MAKE) $(MAKE_K_FLAG) foo foo : $ make echo MAKE='make', MAKEFLAGS='' MAKE=make, MAKEFLAGS= make foo ... $ make -k echo MAKE='make', MAKEFLAGS='k' MAKE=make, MAKEFLAGS=k make k foo ... $ make FOO=kit echo MAKE='make', MAKEFLAGS='FOO=kit' MAKE=make, MAKEFLAGS=FOO=kit make FOO=kit foo ... $ make -k FOO=kit echo MAKE='make', MAKEFLAGS='k -- FOO=kit' MAKE=make, MAKEFLAGS=k -- FOO=kit make k -- FOO=kit foo ... Looking back at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2006-01/msg00075.html the right thing to do IMO is to fix the definition of MAKE_K_FLAG: Please replace the line MAKE_K_FLAG=`case "$(MAKEFLAGS)" in *k*) echo ' -k ';; esac` with MAKE_K_FLAG=`for f in x $(MAKEFLAGS); do \ case $$f in \ *=* | --[!k]*);; \ *k*) echo ' -k ';; \ esac; \ done` Bruno
