RE: Multiple patterns (or Wildcards) in targets?

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Nestor Amaya <address@hidden> writes:

  na> Thank you all for your help. I won't be banging my head any
  na> longer.  Is this perhaps a feature that should be added? It seems
  na> both useful and harmless to me...

Technically it's not backward-compatible, although I doubt hardly anyone
relies on this fact.

I'm not really interested in adding only small incremental improvements
like this, because it's just one more special case to handle.  If we add
the ability to use two %'s, next someone will come up with a case where
they need three, etc.  Then they'll want to reorder them, so that the
match for the first % comes second and the third one comes first,
etc. etc.

I'm quite willing to add something that provides a _comprehensive_
solution to this problem and actually adds significant power to the
existing language.  Currently there are two proposals: a couple of years
ago someone sent a patch that allowed for a "numbered %" feature where
each % was given a number so they could be reorganized.  IIRC the main
problem with this one is it was implemented for only one of static
pattern and regular pattern rules, not both.

The other proposal is even more flexible, but there is nothing
implemented for it yet: that would involve allowing a full regular
expression matching and replacing capability, rather than using simple
pattern substitution.  Even the exact syntax of how this might work is
unclear, plus we'd need to choose a regex library, but it does give the
most power and flexibility.

  na> I am not familiar with open-source development (I'm a chip
  na> designer), so I don't know what the procedure is for submitting
  na> new features (or even if there is one).

Certainly there is one! :).

In general you would make a somewhat more formal proposal for the
changes you want to create, then engage in some discussion about them,
then when people generally agreed you would implement them.  Before they
could be accepted into an FSF-owned package like GNU make you'd need to
sign some copyright disclaimers that assigned the copyright for your
changes to the FSF (most open source projects don't require this, but
the FSF is more formal in this respect).  You will receive back
exclusive rights to your code, so you can use it in other places as you
like, but the FSF wants to be the copyright holder for all code in all
its projects.

Then you'd send the changes as patches, along with ChangeLog entries,
etc., and I'd apply them and/or 

  na> Also, I would to join this distribution list, so that I can
  na> perhaps pitch in what I can.

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