Re: Exit status ignored during variable expansion?

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 22:18 +0300, Angel Tsankov wrote:
> Does anyone have an idea why 'make' ignores the exit status from any 
> commands that are run as part of variable expansion:
> 
> a=$(shell no-such-command)
> b=$(shell false)

What do you think make should do with the exit status of these
operations?  These are not run as part of any rule or target.  I suppose
if it had been documented/worked since the beginning that non-0 exit
codes from the shell function would cause make to fail, that would have
been OK.

But I don't see any clear enough advantage to behaving that way to
justify a massively backward-incompatible change like that.