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Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:24:24 +0100
From: Chris Taylor <chris AT equate DOT dyndns DOT org>
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Subject: Re: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81
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William A. Hoffman wrote:
> At 02:57 PM 8/21/2006, Dave Korn wrote:
>> 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.

> No I don't think you have the nub of it yet. I still think that a simple
> post about a major change being made to make may have helped avoid much of the
> pain of this thread.   You have to admit that dropping a whole class of paths
> from support is more likely to cause trouble than any of the other minor syntax
> changes to gnu make that are not backwards compatible.  I would not expect:

> foo: foo.c
>    gcc foo.c -o foo

> To stop working any time soon in make no matter what changes are made.
> The basic format of makefiles is pretty much fixed, and has been around for
> 20 years or so.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make:

> "POSIX includes standardization of the basic features and operation of the make utility "
> That is the part of make I am talking about when I say the features of make are not
> changing.

> I and others (not exactly sure how many but more than one) did not expect:

> foo: c:/foo.c
>    cl c:/foo.c 

> to stop working the make that came with cygwin.  And in the future it will
> again be supported.  

> I certainly realize that software changes, and that you have to break backwards
> compatibility from time to time.   I am just saying that giving the user community
> an opportunity to step up and make a fix would have been helpful, not necessary or
> required, but helpful and not that hard to do. 

> -Bill

Actually, Dave does have the nub of it. His assertions are accurate in 
your case.

There have been many messages to this list, as well as the release note 
that specifically mentioned that MSDOS paths were no longer supported.
Given that these _were not_ a part of official Make, but were instead 
implemented by patches maintained by cgf, it's not unreasonable for the 
maintainer to say enough is enough.
Even more so given that cygwin is for giving you POSIX functions in 
windows.. DOS paths have no relevance in a POSIX environment. The 
underlying OS isn't relevant.

If a working patch makes it into upstream, or is available for inclusion 
and is clean, w/o affecting anything else, then I have no doubt that cgf 
will consider including it in the next release, but if people had 
actually read the original release notes, then this would not be an issue.

Also, Dave commented earlier on your email saying an email should have 
been sent to the list saying that these changes were going to happen.
It was. It's called the 'release notes'. They go to cygwin-announce, if 
I recall correctly.. Maybe you should subscribe to this one?



One last thing.. Don't reply to me directly (or Dave for that matter); 
we're both on the list.. I set reply-to for a reason..


Chris/EqUaTe (NOT cgf)

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