Re: misunderstanding -s behavior

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2013-03-14 at 18:04 +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> assumes that the Makefile will never be run by a sub-make, which is
> true most of the time, but is false in my case. A more general version
> would thus be:
> 
>      info_misc=`cd doc/misc; ${MAKE} --no-print-directory -s
> echo-info`

The issue with this is that it will fail for non-GNU versions of make.
I'm not sure if the Emacs build requires GNU make or not; most GNU
packages do not (that's one reason automake exists).

You might instead try recommending that they set the value MAKELEVEL to
0 in their command; this will be innocuous to other versions of make but
ensure that GNU make believes it's the top-level make:

    info_misc=`cd doc/misc && MAKELEVEL=0 ${MAKE} -s echo-info`

Alternatively they can use grep or sed on the output to ignore lines
that look like directory entry/exit statements.

Cheers!