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

["Simon J. Gerraty" <sjg%crufty.net@localhost>]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2003 01:10:58 +0200, Marc Espie writes:
>Meaning for :U and :L in OpenBSD predates the corresponding change in
>NetBSD.
>
>Did you even inform us that you were going to add some incompatible :U
>in NetBSD make before it happened ? Nope. I just discovered it while
>trawling for useful changes in your tree.

Sure, no argument here, but I offered to rename our :U and :D so as
not to conflict - but we still had issues over :@ et al.

My point was simply that we _have_ diverged.  There was (and still is
as far as I know) little interest in netbsd of abandoning our make for
yours, nor does there seem much interest in you doing so either ;-)

>The best way to handle modifiers is the approach I took for op-packages:
>making it possible to have any possible meaning as `personalities'. The
>modifiers handling is done in a sufficiently modular way in op-packages
>that adding new modifiers and changing behaviors is somewhat easy.

Sounds interesting but not sure I follow, is op-packages part of your
make?  Pointer to it?

>Since then, you have added lots of modifiers to make. I'm not sure I
>like the direction this is going, because every single modifier you
>are adding, especially the non-uppercase ones, is running a larger
>chance of interfering with normal SystemV modifiers.

Anything _can_ conflict with the SysV :foo=bar, but apart from simple
:%=foo-% and such I see it used very rarely.  I've not heard of any
conflicts (cf. say gnu makefiles using obj and blowing up when used
with BSD make).

>I don't have that much time to hack on make, but I would rather focus on
>more mainstream, useful stuff, like having a better VPATH implementation

Hmmm make is mainstream useful stuff in my world ;-)

Thanks
--sjg