Re: 4.4: embeds volatile information in MAKEFLAGS

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2022-11-07 at 21:55 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>  |However, I don't think that any changes being made for GNU Make 4.4
>  |compatibility, would render the makefile unusable with GNU Make 4.3
>  |(unless they start actually using the new features like the new
>  |functions, but I don't know of any projects doing so yet... of
> course
>  |that doesn't mean they are not) so sticking with 4.3 shouldn't
> render
>  |any projects unbuildable.
> 
> To be honest i also struggled with what to do per se.  We want to
> preserve MAKEFLAGS for future invocations, but now would need to
> clean it up to work around things that cause problems further on.
> (Parsing this requires understanding of shell quoting.  And noone
> knows what users may want to do or use for flags.)

I guess what I was trying to say is that you shouldn't feel pressured
to upgrade to GNU Make 4.4, yourself, if it causes problems, since it's
highly unlikely that any of the projects you're building will stop
working with GNU Make 4.3: any changes they are making to support 4.4
will not _require_ 4.4; they will be backward-compatible with 4.3.

You can stay on 4.3 until there's a GNU Make release that doesn't cause
such problems for you.