Re: repost - target with a colon in the name

[Boris Kolpackov]

"Asperheim, Eric" <address@hidden> writes:

> 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. 

There are ways to implement it in a backwards-compatible manner. One 
of them, which I am using in my -bk patch-set, is to use MAKEFLAGS 
variable from inside make. It would boil down to saying something like 
this in you 'rules' make that you include in each makefile:

ifneq ($(findstring --allow-escape-colon,$(MAKEFLAGS)),)

  MAKEFLAGS += --allow-escape-colon

endif


Also I don't mind including this feature in my patch-set if you
come up with the patch ;-).


-boris