RE: eval and if-blocks incompatible on i386-pc-linux-gnu

[Dave Korn]

Tom Tromey wrote on :

>>>>>> "Dave" == Dave Korn writes:
> 
> Dave> Interesting factoid: This bug is[*] also fixed (or perhaps was
> Dave> never exposed) in remake[**], which is still based on the 3.80
> Dave> sources. 
> 
> I looked through the remake web site a bit -- this looks pretty cool,
> especially now that I'm doing some wacky things with GNU make.  Why
> isn't this part of GNU make itself?  It seems to me that it would be
> more useful if the debugger were just a standard feature.


  Historical reasons only, AFAIK.  I guess for the definitive answer, you'd
best ask Rocky and/or Paul, but TTBOMK there are no political or license
problems, just that the remake code has diverged quite a bit from the original
make sources and it would now involve some fairly radical surgery to merge
them back together that nobody has yet had the wherewithal to do.

  I'm personally of the opinion that remake is an absolute god-send, it's
really quite fantastic.  I wrote and maintain a build system that has next to
no static rules in it, everything is generated and eval'd from fragments at
runtime, with hierarchical overriding for specialisation and derivation with
inheritance; I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of debugging it without being
able to step through it while it ran, seeing the actual values in variables
and the results returned from functions, but remake made it trivially simple
for me; I think that the debugger substantially enables a whole new level of
makefile engineering.  So I'd like to see it merged upstream too, but I also
don't have that kind of spare time to commit to any such project.


    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
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