This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81


William A. Hoffman wrote:
At 02:57 PM 8/21/2006, Dave Korn wrote:
On 21 August 2006 18:58, William A. Hoffman wrote:

of, make is changing beware, it may have been noticed.  Let's face make
is not a project you expect to see a bunch of change happening on,
especially a change that breaks existing makefiles.
Ah. We have the nub of it.

No I don't think you have the nub of it yet. I still think that a simple
post about a major change being made to make may have helped avoid much of the
pain of this thread.   You have to admit that dropping a whole class of paths
from support is more likely to cause trouble than any of the other minor syntax
changes to gnu make that are not backwards compatible.  I would not expect:

foo: foo.c
   gcc foo.c -o foo

To stop working any time soon in make no matter what changes are made.
The basic format of makefiles is pretty much fixed, and has been around for
20 years or so.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make:

"POSIX includes standardization of the basic features and operation of the make utility "
That is the part of make I am talking about when I say the features of make are not
changing.

I and others (not exactly sure how many but more than one) did not expect:

foo: c:/foo.c
cl c:/foo.c

to stop working the make that came with cygwin. And in the future it will
again be supported.

I certainly realize that software changes, and that you have to break backwards
compatibility from time to time. I am just saying that giving the user community
an opportunity to step up and make a fix would have been helpful, not necessary or
required, but helpful and not that hard to do.

-Bill

Actually, Dave does have the nub of it. His assertions are accurate in your case.


There have been many messages to this list, as well as the release note that specifically mentioned that MSDOS paths were no longer supported.
Given that these _were not_ a part of official Make, but were instead implemented by patches maintained by cgf, it's not unreasonable for the maintainer to say enough is enough.
Even more so given that cygwin is for giving you POSIX functions in windows.. DOS paths have no relevance in a POSIX environment. The underlying OS isn't relevant.


If a working patch makes it into upstream, or is available for inclusion and is clean, w/o affecting anything else, then I have no doubt that cgf will consider including it in the next release, but if people had actually read the original release notes, then this would not be an issue.

Also, Dave commented earlier on your email saying an email should have been sent to the list saying that these changes were going to happen.
It was. It's called the 'release notes'. They go to cygwin-announce, if I recall correctly.. Maybe you should subscribe to this one?




One last thing.. Don't reply to me directly (or Dave for that matter); we're both on the list.. I set reply-to for a reason..


Chris/EqUaTe (NOT cgf)


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]