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Re: magic variables for included fragments


From: Akim Demaille
Subject: Re: magic variables for included fragments
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:21:50 +0100


Le 4 déc. 08 à 09:38, Ralf Wildenhues a écrit :

I have a silly question, but... is it really known for a fact that some
Make out there do not support "include if it exists"?

This question is not relevant to the problem.  Automake requires some
'make'-provided inclusion mechanism to work, otherwise dependency
tracking will not work.  What is the question is: do we need to use an
inclusion mechanism that fails if the file to be included does not exist
yet?  In general, the answer is "yes", because there are make
implementations that provide no other.

Ok. And these makes can be fooled to implement the feature by computing the file name at make-time instead of passing a litteral?

And even with those that do,
like GNU make, one would not want to hide problems where the included
snippets have buggily not been included as needed.

You have a point, but at some point, it becomes more a burden than a feature :( I am regularly bitten by the schizophrenic implementation of this feature, static parts at config.status time, and the rest at runtime.

While at it, I have another portability question: are there (alive)
shells known not to support () for case patterns?

case $host in
 (*win*) abort;;
 (*)     dance;;
esac

Yes, Solaris /bin/sh for example.

Thanks Ralf!



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