Hi Marc, Marc Espie wrote on Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 01:52:37PM +0100:
> So there is some luggage in make that I think we should drop. > > Currently, our make "supports" the keywords > .EXEC, .INVISIBLE, .JOIN, .MADE, > to the extent that I never touched the code that handles those, but > frankly I don't quite see their purpose (they're hacks) and they > complicate matters. > > A quick grep shows that nothing in base/xenocara actually uses them. > > To be sure, I'm going to "poison" them and do a full build of everything > including ports. I don't think i can meaningfully review your patch to the code, but when all the above tests complete to your satisfaction, i certainly don't object to removing these keywords. > If you want to know what they are supposed to do, it's documented in > PSD.doc/make.ms > > I've attached the pdf file generated through groff. > > Yes, it's not even in our manpage (except for .MADE) > > There are two possible options there: actually fully document those keywords > (and probably grab some examples from the tutorial, because frankly, it's > fairly hard to make sense of them) or drop the keywords entirely as they > appear to be completely unused. > > I would lean toward the second option. I'm pretty sure that stuff is not > even correctly supported, to the detriment of actually having a modern > make that works. If your ports bulk build goes well, i fully support no longer documenting them at all. I mean, that's stuff then * not required by the standard * not used by anything * likely broken for quite some time so it would be nothing but a distraction in the documentation. Documentation is better when all parts of it are relevant. If you see some good arguments why one or more of them should be documented, i wouldn't stand in the way either, but from what you said so far, i don't see the point. If you run into *significant* use in the ports tree, that might possibly modify the situation, of course. Yours, Ingo
