RE: repost - target with a colon in the name

[Asperheim, Eric]

Paul,

Thanks for info. At least I know where I stand on this.

But, few things frustrate me more than backward compatibility preventing
improvements from being made. If you did add syntax to support escaping
of : in prereqs, I don't doubt that some Makefiles might break. But, I
would think that it would be a very, very small % of Makefiles. And,
those Makefiles could be update to work with this new version, i.e. that
issue can be fixed within the tool. I on the other hand will have to
hack around this problem since a solution doesn't exist in gmake. So, I
don't agree that 100% adherence to backward compatibility is the right
solution. Just my opinion. 

Note, I appreciate your help on this issue and other issues in the past.

Thanks,

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Smith [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Paul D.
Smith
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 12:27 PM
To: Asperheim, Eric
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: RE: repost - target with a colon in the name

There is no good way to do this, I'm sorry to say.  Unfortunately when
GNU make was designed issues of escaping special characters were not
widely considered, leading to inconsistencies.  I don't know of any way,
offhand, to escape a ":" in the prerequisites list.

Even more unfortunately, every time I've suggested a syntax change such
as allowing escaping of special chars in the prerequisites list with
"\", I hear from people who have makefiles that would break.

-- 
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