Re: GNU make 4.2.90 release candidate available

[Dennis Clarke]

On 9/3/19 9:32 AM, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-08-28 at 17:35 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> > > This also disables every extension over C, especially POSIX.
> >
> > Is this a *bad* thing or a *good* thing ?  What is the actual language
> > dialect that GNU Make wishes to be compliant with is the real question.
>
> Like all GNU software, it is written to work with a minimum version but
> uses autoconf facilities to take advantage of the newest capabilities
> it can detect... that's kind of autoconf's raison d'être.
>
> So, it is not useless to test building with all improvements turned off
> because it lets us know whether our attempts to support very old
> environments are still working properly.
>
> But I would not recommend using such options when trying to compile an
> actual, useful GNU make for everyday use, as it will be full of
> workarounds and hacks and won't take advantage of modern POSIX features
> which give better behavior and performance.

Well I have older systems to run and work with and so the software needs
to work there. Period.  Unless some statement is made that says "GNU
Make will no longer be supported on these platforms ..." which is the
approach that the GCC folks take.



--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional