RE: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81

["William A. Hoffman" <billlist at nycap dot rr dot com>]

At 02:57 PM 8/21/2006, Dave Korn wrote:
>On 21 August 2006 18:58, William A. Hoffman wrote:
>
>> of, make is changing beware, it may have been noticed.  Let's face make
>> is not a project you expect to see a bunch of change happening on,
>> especially a change that breaks existing makefiles.
>
>  Ah.  We have the nub of it.

No I don't think you have the nub of it yet. I still think that a simple
post about a major change being made to make may have helped avoid much of the
pain of this thread.   You have to admit that dropping a whole class of paths
from support is more likely to cause trouble than any of the other minor syntax
changes to gnu make that are not backwards compatible.  I would not expect:

foo: foo.c
   gcc foo.c -o foo

To stop working any time soon in make no matter what changes are made.
The basic format of makefiles is pretty much fixed, and has been around for
20 years or so.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make:

"POSIX includes standardization of the basic features and operation of the make utility "
That is the part of make I am talking about when I say the features of make are not
changing.

I and others (not exactly sure how many but more than one) did not expect:

foo: c:/foo.c
   cl c:/foo.c 

to stop working the make that came with cygwin.  And in the future it will
again be supported.  

I certainly realize that software changes, and that you have to break backwards
compatibility from time to time.   I am just saying that giving the user community
an opportunity to step up and make a fix would have been helpful, not necessary or
required, but helpful and not that hard to do. 

-Bill




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