Re: Possible bug in Makefile 3.81

[Karl Berry]

    My understanding is that [ and
    test have been synonyms for a long time, 

Well, they were always "synonyms" in the sense that they were
(typically, at least) hard links to each other.  But the behavior
obviously differs; [ has to strip a trailing ] argument.  There were
bugs in that parsing on some systems in the 1980's, when this stuff was
getting developed.  Using test avoided the bugs.

    primarily because test is less likely to mess up quoting rules in
    autoconf macros.

A good reason to prefer test.

Since there is no reason to prefer [, it is good to keep using test,
because of the quoting, and for consistency with all the existing code
that does so.

    so that you should not have any worries about interchanging them
    today on any practical porting target.

Agreed.  

karl