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From: "Dave Korn" <dave DOT korn AT artimi DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 19:57:44 +0100
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On 21 August 2006 18:58, William A. Hoffman wrote:

> of, make is changing beware, it may have been noticed.  Let's face make
> is not a project you expect to see a bunch of change happening on,
> especially a change that breaks existing makefiles.

  Ah.  We have the nub of it.

  Make is not a project that /you/ expect to see a bunch of changes happening
on.  However, you speak only for yourself.

  Anyone who has read the docs or NEWS file or even the recent cygwin package
announcement, or visited the make homepage or read any of the mailing lists,
will be aware of the active development work on make.  There are half-a-dozen
*other* non-backwardly compatible changes in the pipeline coming up, which
nobody here has mentioned anything that would suggest they were even aware of,
but they were all listed in that recent announcement.

  In short, anyone whose opinion is based on research and fact, rather than
guesswork and wishful thinking, DOES expect make to be changing.

  Software *does* change.  It /needs/ to.  Developers like to do what they can
to keep backward compatibility, but sometimes it's best for the future
development of an application to just let some old feature go.  There has
never been any guarantee that nothing will ever change and everything will
work for ever, and that is why it is reckless and negligent to regularly use
setup.exe to indiscriminately upgrade all and everything you have installed
and running on a given system.

  So, your problem is that you were expecting reality to conform to your
unverified assumptions, and got all het up when it didn't, and now insist that
it is reality itself that is at fault for not being how you expected it to be,
and demand that nobody ever do anything and nothing ever change, so that you
need not be inconvenienced by your non-preparation.  That's not a reasonable
nor practical demand, and you should be able to understand why it gets short
shrift.


    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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