Re: MAKEFLAGS and auto-including another makefile

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Paul D. Smith wrote:

> %% Ken Smith <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   >> and print the value of ${MAKEFLAGS}, what i get is "I /a/b/c".  but if
>   >> i have multiple options, all subsequent options will have the leading
>   >> hyphen.
>
>   ks> I confirmed this behavior.  Seems strange to me too.  However, the
>   ks> option's effect gets properly propogated to a submake.
>
> I don't know what the original authors were thinking (smoking...?
> :-)) when they came up with this, but it's standard behavior across
> all versions of make, going back in time, and is specified by the
> POSIX definition of make.

i'm assuming it was to let them be able to write "-${MAKEFLAGS}", but
that doesn't strike me as a really compelling reason.  it would be
interesting to know what they *were* thinking.  so you don't know the
rationale, then?  pity.

rday