Re: use eval to emit only part of a rule?

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2021-05-17 at 15:20 -0800, Britton Kerin wrote:
> I'd like to use eval to emit some boilerplate vars and everything
> short of the prereq list for a static pattern rule.  Is it possible?

No.  There are a number of problems with what you're doing.

First, an eval'd string is treated the same way as an included
makefile: it must be a complete makefile and any uncompleted rule will
be forcibly completed at the end of the eval before it returns.

Second, the reason you  are seeing weird behavior is that a
backslash/newline is removed from the variable before it's passed to
eval, it's not preserved and somehow converted back into a newline by
eval.  If you want to eval a variable containing actual newlines you
have to define the variable using define/endef.

If you want to debug eval operations, replace the eval function with an
info function.  make will print out the exact string that the eval will
evaluate and it must be a valid makefile.

In your situation if you add:

    $(info $(call PSTHT, parts_ordered))

you'll see the output is:

 parts_ordered_STAMPS = $(PBT:.pcb=. parts_ordered.stamp) PRODUCTION_STAMPS += 
$( parts_ordered_STAMPS) vpath %. parts_ordered.stamp $(STD) $( 
parts_ordered_STAMPS): %. parts_ordered.stamp

all on one line... in other words, it's not a syntax error because
you're not actually defining any of these rules, you're just creating a
variable named "parts_ordered_STAMPS" that contains the entire very
long value.