dashes in Makefile macro names

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Can you use $(FOO-BAR) in Makefile? It's not portable in POSIX [1]
  "Applications shall select macro names from the set of characters
   consisting solely of periods, underscores, digits, and alphabetics
   from the portable character set"
And the Autoconf manual too says that it's not portable [2].

But Paul Eggert found a number of such Makefile macro names in Emacs [3],
which have apparently not been hurting for years.

Prompted by this, I've tested the support for Makefile macro names with
dashes in
  - GNU make,
  - dmake 4.12,
  - smake 1.2.1,
  - the vendor 'make' in
    - MacOS X,
    - FreeBSD 6.4,
    - OpenBSD 4.4,
    - NetBSD 5.0,
    - AIX 5.1,
    - HP-UX 10.20,
    - IRIX 6.5 (also pmake, smake),
    - OSF/1 5.1,
    - Solaris 2.6 (also dmake),
and found that all support it. The test was this Makefile:

================== Makefile ===================
FOO-BAR = yellow_dog
FOO_BAR = green_cat

all : $(FOO-BAR)

$(FOO-BAR) : greet_dog

$(FOO_BAR) : greet_cat

greet_dog:
        echo hello my dog

greet_cat:
        echo hello my cat
================================================

So I think it's time to update the Autoconf documentation by adding a
sentence. Here's a proposed patch.

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/make.html
[2] 
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/html_node/Special-Chars-in-Names.html
[3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-01/msg01031.html


2011-01-28  Bruno Haible  <address@hidden>

        doc: Don't discourage dashes in Makefile macro names.
        * doc/autoconf.texi (Special Chars in Names): Mention that dashes in
        Makefile macro names are supported.

--- doc/autoconf.texi.orig      Fri Jan 28 12:34:38 2011
+++ doc/autoconf.texi   Fri Jan 28 12:26:49 2011
@@ -19183,10 +19183,12 @@
 @section Special Characters in Make Macro Names
 
 Posix limits macro names to nonempty strings containing only
-ASCII letters and digits, @samp{.}, and @samp{_}.  Many
address@hidden implementations allow a wider variety of characters, but
-portable makefiles should avoid them.  It is portable to start a name
-with a special character, e.g., @samp{$(.FOO)}.
+ASCII letters and digits, @samp{.}, and @samp{_}.  Although Posix does
+not allow dashes @samp{-} in names, all known current @command{make}
+implementations support them.  Many @command{make} implementations allow
+a wider variety of characters, but portable makefiles should avoid them.
+It is portable to start a name with a special character, e.g.,
address@hidden(.FOO)}.
 
 Some ancient @command{make} implementations don't support leading
 underscores in macro names.  An example is NEWS-OS 4.2R.