Re: Make and makefile bugs (PRs 49085, 49086, 49087)

[Jarmo Jaakkola <jarmo.jaakkola%roskakori.fi@localhost>]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 04:08:42PM +0400, Valery Ushakov wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 13:16:11 +0300, Jarmo Jaakkola wrote:
> > Do you mean that .NULL should support multiple suffixes?  Sounds a bit
> > hairy.
> 
> I don't understand.  .NULL is a syntactic crutch that is ncessary
> since transformation rule syntax requires two suffixes.  But there's
> just one empty suffix, so why would you need multiple .NULL suffixes -
> except for obvious considerations of modularity, but that's somewhat
> orthogonal, as .NULL suffix already conflicts with a real suffix.

I'd suppose that the reason would be that the fake suffix could be
different in some cases.  The rule "foo" -> "foo.a" could be the same as
the rule to make "foo.b" -> "foo.a", but for "foo" -> "foo.x" it could
be "foo.y" -> "foo.x" instead of "foo.b" -> "foo.x".

Of course, in this case it would actually make sense to use ".dummy"
(or ".crap" as it so eloquently put before ;).  So:
    .SUFFIXES: .a .b .x .y .dummy
    .b.a .dummy.a:
        ...
    .y.x .dummy.x:
    .NULL: .dummy

But hey, thanks!  This gave me some ideas I'll present when I reply to
Christos' mail.

-- 
Jarmo Jaakkola