Re: CVS commit: src/usr.bin/make

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <20160220065832.GA9068%netbsd.org@localhost>,
David Holland  <dholland-sourcechanges%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 01:19:03AM +0000, Simon J. Gerraty wrote:
> > Modified Files:
> > 	src/usr.bin/make: [lots of very random stuff]
>
>Was any of this discussed anywhere?

Yes, we discussed it privately. The short explanation is:

The previous fix to avoid eating $'s in := assignments broken some uses
that were legitimate:

1. export environment changes .export-literal:
	Previously there was no way to export variables into the environment
	without having their values expanded. It is useful for sub-makes to
	be able to pass such variables unexpanded and have the sub-make expand
	them.
2. SAVE_DOLLARS: There were some complex use cases that took advantage of the
	previous $$ -> $ behavior of := that broke. Although it is unclear if
	there is a better way to do this, the expedient method was to provide
	a knob to enable or disable the behavior. We are going to revisit this.
	As for the variable name, we discussed better names, but we both
	thought that SAVE_DOLLARS was funny so we kept it.

christos