Re: Missing features from .FEATURES

[Jean Pierre LeJacq]

On Wednesday 22 October 2014 15:09 Paul Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-10-22 at 14:05 -0400, Jean Pierre LeJacq wrote:
>> GNU Make uses the special variable .FEATURES to advertise which features
>> your version of make supports.
>> 
>> For some reason, not all features are supported. For example, secondary,
>> delete on error, and posix mode.
>> 
>> What is the rationale for leaving these out?
> 
> The .FEATURES variable was itself added in GNU make 3.81.  Any feature
> that was available before that release is not included in .FEATURES.
> Or, put another way, the mere fact that the .FEATURES variable has some
> value is enough to conclude that those capabilities are present.
> 
> I'm not positive what you mean by "secondary" and "posix mode", so I'm
> not completely confident this answers your question, but
> .DELETE_ON_ERROR was added in GNU make 3.72, released in 1994.

I was referring to .POSIX for parsing and execution in POSIX-conforming 
mode. I believe this is a more recent "feature" of GNU Make.

The other was the special target .SECONDARY for preventing deletion of 
intermediate files. I believe this has been in GNU Make for some time.


> And, there have been times where new features have been added but
> nothing was added to .FEATURES; sometimes the presence of these is
> testable in other obvious ways.  Sometimes we forgot :-/.

Thanks Paul, that's make sense. Would bug reports be appropriate for the 
missing ones?

-- 
JP