GNU make 3.81rc2 available and I'm worried

[Shaddy Baddah <sbaddah at mycom-int dot fr dot invalid>]

Hi,

According to the announcement of GNU make 3.81 release candidate 2 
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/make-alpha/2006-03/msg00007.html), 
3.81 is coming (or should of came last week), and I'm worried. I am 
worried that there isn't going to be a quick turn-around in getting a 
Cygwin build out. Before proceeding full on with why I am worried, I'll 
ask the question. Obviously there are no guarantees, but does the GNU 
make maintainer expect that is going to be easy enough to get out a 
Cygwin build soon after the official release?

My worry that there will be a delay is two part. The first part... I 
downloaded GNU make 3.81rc2 and configured/built it out of the box. Good 
news it seems. The problem though is that there is a regression that 
causes the following error:

mergespecrules.mk:14: *** target pattern contains no `%'.  Stop.

where make is confusing eval'ed as regular rules of the form:

TARGETS : PREREQUISITES
	COMMAND

because for whatever reason, it using the windows form of the paths like:

merge.txt : c:/mergespecs/1/merge.txt c:/mergespecs/2/merge.txt
	mergecmd $@ $^

and the extra colons make make think they are "Static Pattern Rules" of 
the form:

TARGETS ...: TARGET-PATTERN: PREREQ-PATTERNS ...
	COMMANDS

Or that is the problem as I read it. Deeper analysis left out, this 
doesn't happen under linux or w32 builds, so it suggests to me that 
Cygwin builds need patches.

The second part is, the last Cygwin GNU make, version 3.80, was on 
6/21/2003, a long while ago now. And the patches I produced against the 
pristine 3.80 don't seem to have been included upstream into 3.81rc2. 
That suggests to me that someone is going to have to piece together the 
reasoning and merge the patches before making the Cygwin build.

In any case, I'll be keeping my eye out, and if I have spare time, I 
will try and solve this problem myself. Would an experimental release be 
in order?

Regards,
Shaddy

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