Scripsit David Boyce <dsb@xxxxxxxxxx>
> At 08:20 PM 12/10/2002 +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> >Risk assessment: Existing makefiles may break if the first character
> >of a dependency is & or | *and* they're written by a whitespace-phobic.
> I'd suggest that "risk assessment" be expanded to include the possibility
> that some other make-alike uses this syntax for something else.
Agreed.
FWIW, I've checked the manuals for the system `make' tools on SunOS
5.7 and 5.8, Digital OSF1 V4.0, and HP-UX 10 and 20, as well as
/usr/lib/svr4.make on SunOS 5.8. I have also scanned the www
documentation for {Net,Free,Open}BSD make, dmake, Lucent nmake and
(briefly) Microsoft nmake.
Neither mentions any special use of either & or | in makefiles, except
that some makes use & as a wildcard inside variable substitutions.
BSD make allows || and && in its conditionals (which are incompatible
with GNU make's and cannot be mistaken for rules anyway).
Lucent nmake has a '&=' assignment operator, which will not conflict
with "&:". Some makes have a $& automatic variable.
dmake has a :| separator with a different but related semantics:
%.o :| %.c %.r %.f ; some rule
is equivalent to:
%.o : %.c ; some rule
%.o : %.r ; some rule
%.o : %.f ; some rule
This implies agrees intuively with my proposed |: variant (note that
Paul convinced me to put modifiers *before* the colon rather than
after it).
I don't claim comprehensiveness of this analysis. There are surely
lots of makes out there that I don't know about.
--
Henning Makholm "... a specialist in the breakaway
oxidation phenomena of certain nuclear reactors."
|
