On Tue, 2024-07-16 at 20:27 +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > As discussed in a different thread, the docs claim that GNUMAKEFLAGS > and > MAKEFLAGS are treated in the same way. > > All else equal, since I'm using GNU-specific flags, I think I should > be > using GNUMAKEFLAGS. > > However, Paul said that I should use MAKEFLAGS, because GNUMAKEFLAGS > is not special when passing -R and/or -r.
That's not actually what I said. What I said was that GNUMAKEFLAGS is not special when it appears inside a makefile. It's only special when it's read from the environment. That is, this does what you expect: $ GNUMAKEFLAGS=-Rr make -f Makefile but this doesn't do what you expect: $ cat Makefile.pre GNUMAKEFLAGS += -Rr $ make -f Makefile.pre -f Makefile > Should make(1) be patched to actually treat GNUMAKEFLAGS the same as > MAKEFLAGS? > > Or maybe should the docs be fixed to say that GNUMAKEFLAGS doesn't > have the special properties that MAKEFLAGS has? I think it will be difficult to change make to treat GNUMAKEFLAGS as special inside a makefile. The entire handling of makefiles is a hornets nest, and we are stung repeatedly every time we try to tweak it to work differently. And, I'm not convinced such a thing is really useful. If you are writing a makefile and you are relying on this always being set, it's almost 100% guaranteed that your makefile won't work with any other version o make anyway. So I'm not sure I see the harm in having people write: MAKEFLAGS += -rR inside their makefiles, if that's the behavior they want.
