Re: [Mingw-msys] RE: Differences between mingw-make and msys' make

[Earnie Boyd]

"Paul D. Smith" wrote:
> 
> %% Earnie Boyd <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>   eb> No, Soren had made mention of portable Makefile for use by some
>   eb> other make besides gmake.  VPATH isn't portable for this
>   eb> situation.
> 
> True, but just having the variable VPATH set in your makefile doesn't
> _hurt_ anything.  It's just another unused variable.  This is why we
> recommend using VPATH wherever possible: using the vpath syntax is GNU
> make specific and a syntax error in other versions of make.
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yes, so, if you're concerned about being portable with multiple vendors
of make then dependency with VPATH operation makes it non-portable.
> 
> You just can't get the benefit of compiling in other directories if you
> don't use GNU make (or at least a make that has "sane" VPATH
> characteristics), but compiling in the same directory still works.
> 
I'm all for using VPATH, and if some vendor make doesn't work I always
replace it.  I'm not arguing about not using VPATH.  My argument is to
"if some vendor make doesn't work, replace it with what does."  Gmake is
freely available.

Earnie.