Michael G Schwern wrote:
Steve Hay wrote:
However, I'd like to propose that the attached patch gets slipped into
this release too. This patch removes the .SUFFIXES target from the
Makefile generated when using dmake. I'm going to release a new build
of dmake onto CPAN soon, and the latest version now issues a warning
like the following whenever it sees the .SUFFIXES target:
dmake: makefile: line 415: Warning: -- The .SUFFIXES target has no
special meaning and is deprecated.
As you can imagine, that makes quite a mess of various modules' build
and test processes unless we get rid of the needless .SUFFIXES target.
Why are you removing the .SUFFIXES target? Isn't it useful? Won't that
break compatibility (as demonstrated here)?
The patch only removes .SUFFIXES for dmake (not for nmake). It does
this because (a) dmake has never made any use of .SUFFIXES in living
memory, and (b) the upcoming version of dmake has deprecated .SUFFIXES
and now issues a warning about any use of it.
I just dug out Sarathy's old version of dmake ("version 4.1 PL1")--the
version that was most used before I started putting newer versions onto
CPAN (and which may well still be widely used)--and here are two
snippets from its manpage:
NOTE: .SUFFIXES is ignored by dmake it is used
here simply as an example.
dmake bases all of its inferences on the inference graph
constructed from the %-rules defined in the makefile. It
knows exactly which targets can be made from which prereq-
uisites by making queries on the inference graph. For
this reason .SUFFIXES is not needed and is completely
ignored.
So you can see that even this old version made no use of .SUFFIXES and
therefore shouldn't be affected by its removal.
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