On Thu, 2021-09-09 at 10:07 +0100, Geoff Clare via austin-group-l at The Open Group wrote: > You took a risk when you added ::= to gmake while it was only an > ccepted proposal, not part of an approved revision to the standard. > And gmake users who make use of it in the expectation that is will > be required by POSIX are taking a similar risk.
This is a fine position when POSIX is following it's normal charter which is to standardize existing behaviors that have been proven to be useful or at least widely used. It's a problem when POSIX is inventing new syntax, like it is here. Especially if issues are only published every 10 years or more. That position suggests that implementations will not make new features available until AFTER they have been standardized by POSIX, else risk introducing backward-incompatible behavior to their users. That makes the standard poorer; I'm sure we're all aware of the dangers of standardizing before implementing. In any event, I don't see why this particular feature should be different than any other: if GNU make had added ::= on its own, not due to some putative change in POSIX, and it had 13 years of use in the wild under its belt, I doubt there would be much consideration of adding ::= to the standard in an incompatible way.
