On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 11:36 +0200, G wrote: > Passed variables to "imported" func. submake are not passed at all or > are empty. > > How do I get around the problem?
The best answer is, "don't do that". As the stackoverflow answer points out, make will EXPAND the value of every variable it exports. This is obviously correct behavior, because exported variables were not intended to be used to send large complex scripts between different instances of make. They were intended to set environment variables, like the shell does, to communicate with programs that make invokes. If make did not expand exported variables before putting them into the environment, then things like this: BINDIR = bin export PATH := $(PATH):$(BINDIR) would clearly not work correctly. The right way to reuse the same complex content between multiple instances of make is through included files; take the content you want to share, put it into a separate makefile, and then add: include sharedstuff.mk to your makefiles. If you REALLY REALLY want to do this, there's no way to do it other than creating a separate variable to be exported. You can take advantage of the $(value ...) function to prevent the content of the variable from being expanded. For example if you have this: $ cat Makefile BAR = bar export FOO = $(BAR) all: ; $(MAKE) -f submake.mk $ cat submake.mk BAR = notbar all: ; @echo FOO=$(FOO) The output of running it will be "FOO=bar", not "FOO=notbar", because FOO was expanded by the parent makefile. On the other hand if you use this: $ cat Makefile BAR = bar FOO = $(BAR) export EXFOO = $(value FOO) all: ; $(MAKE) -f submake.mk $ cat submake.mk BAR = notbar FOO = $(EXFOO) all: ; @echo FOO=$(FOO) the output will be "FOO=notbar" which is what you want, because EXFOO was expanded but that puts the _value_ of the FOO variable into the environment.
