Re: I need support with a planned POSIX make extension

[(Joerg Schilling) <schily%schily.net@localhost>]

Hi,

after severel POSIX teleconferences, we (the people who usually discuss the 
issues in the teleconferences) have a question related to the behavior of the
special macro .MAKE.SAVE_DOLLARS while using := in bmake:

It seems that the := feature in bmake is available since at least 1993 (I 
could not find an older version in the netbsd version control) so it seems 
that *BSD was happy with the original behavior of := for a long time (more 
than 20 years). 

To me it seems that the ability of not expanding $$ for := and the new switch 
.MAKE.SAVE_DOLLARS have been introduced in 2016 in order to make it easier to
handle some rare corner cases. Is this true?

What I can see from the Changelog is that a change on 2016-02-17 caused that $$
was never expanded with := and with another change 2 days later on 2016-02-19
.MAKE.SAVE_DOLLARS was introduced with a default to the original behavior.

We are now planning to standardize the behavior in POSIX as :::= but are 
currently not sure which behavior should become the default behavior for 
POSIX and whether there should be a way to switch behavior at all.

Could you please tell us your preference?

Do you believe that POSIX should include a method to control whether $$ is 
expanded with := or not?

Jörg

-- 
EMail:joerg%schily.net@localhost                  Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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