Make gotcha

Steve Biskis mlx@san.rr.com
Sat Oct 17 07:00:00 GMT 1998


If this is already commonly known just walk on by.

To me this was a revelation this morning:

You may NOT have a : in echo statements in your makefiles
on the win32 platform.  Doesn't matter if the statement is within
literals or not.  make (3.76.1) seems to think that : is part of a rule
no matter where it lies !!!  
This is not the case with the Gnu make that ships with NeXTSTEP 3.3 
or the make (3.74) of OpenSTEP 4.1.

In other words:

echo Including MASTER MAKE FILE: $(MASTER_MAKE)

Doesn't work on the win32 platform but cranks just fine on UNIX.
(I haven't checked what the UNIX version of this newer 3.76.1 does
but I'd be surprised if parsing intellegence would be lost going forward
so I'm more inclined to believe it got lost in the win32 port.)

I have a fairly complex make scheme that handles several architectures and
nests many layers (via include) deep - so until this one finally slapped me
in
the face I'd been using the old OpenSTEP v4.1 make and sh until now -
HURRAH !!!


Hope this helps someone.


da bisk

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