On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 02:22:27PM +0200, Marc Espie wrote: > On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 11:13:59AM +0200, Joachim Schipper wrote: > > > > Would a patch for this be desirable? I have very limited hacking time, > > but I could try to come up with something over the weekend/next week. It > > should, of course, be extensively tested before applying. > > > > (OTOH, the current behaviour is sufficiently surprising that I'd expect > > any Makefiles not explicitly written for BSD make to assume the GNU > > behaviour.) > > Whenever I'll have time, I'll sit down and see what the correct behavior > should be. > > Don't waste your time on patches right now. I'll veto them until I've > formed an opinion.
The current behavior has no logical reason to change. := is documented as doing something sensible. This is an extension to POSIX 1003.1 anyways, so what you're trying to do isn't portable (well, not in the way you do it anyways, especially since sed -re isn't portable either...) I ought to document that Xmas tree operators like :+= work, as well ;)
