Re: GNU make 4.2.93 release candidate available

[Edward Welbourne]

On 2020-01-11 13:22, Martin Dorey wrote:
>> Keeping the new, correct behavior in the .POSIX case, with no
>> warning, that might fly, as long as none of Dennis’s myriad failing
>> builds use .POSIX.  I can imagine Paul finding this third option
>> depressing but I think the real value here is in telling the
>> maintainer that their makefile is broken rather than in fixing a
>> posix conformance corner case that no one ever noticed.

Dennis Clarke (11 January 2020 22:09) replied
> I would like to make the suggestion here that it is entirely
> reasonable after a four year release stretch to build in a
> warning. Such a trivial warning would give people time to fix the
> error of their Makefile ways while also allowing for the world to keep
> on building software. At the very least it shows the software
> maintainers that there are to be no sudden surprises when the next
> release of GNU Make comes along and it will actually enforce the
> correct behavior.  My hope is that the time to that next release is at
> least six months.  What say you all to such a compromise?

Sounds like a sane plan to me - give folk at least one release's warning
before making a change that (we now know) will break existing make
files.  Painful to not be able to simply fix the bug, but pragmatic.

        Eddy.