Re: how vpath should behave

[David Boyce]

Not quite related but maybe this is a good time to point out an actual
failing of vpath: there's no way to query the current value. You can add to
the vpath and you can clear it and start over but there's no documented way
to find out what it currently is.

David

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 4:58 PM Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 2021-05-19 at 15:09 -0800, Britton Kerin wrote:
> > It looks to me like when vpath evolved from VPATH a few things could
> > have been better:
>
> Neither vpath nor VPATH are there to find _TARGETS_, as I mentioned
> before.  They won't work for that, and they're not intended to work for
> that.
>
> They are there to find _SOURCES_ (that is, files that make does not
> build itself but that already exist before make starts).
>
> You might find this blog post illuminating:
>
>   http://make.mad-scientist.net/papers/how-not-to-use-vpath/
>
>
>