Re: Possible solution for special characters in makefile paths

[Bill Cox]

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On 2/20/14, 10:44 AM, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 09:47 -0800, Bill Cox wrote:
>> Unless someone suggests a truly backward-compatible mechanism, I 
>> recommend that this change trigger at least a major version
>> number change, and possibly (yech) fork the tool.
> 
> Can you provide some justification for that position?  I'm
> interested in recommendations and suggestions, but I'd prefer that
> they come with _some_ supporting arguments.
> 
> Also I don't know what "fork the tool" means.
> 
> There are backward incompatible "edge-case" changes on virtually
> every release of GNU make; see the NEWS file for examples.  Given
> the free-form format of makefiles it's almost impossible to make 
> advancements without encroaching on behaviors somewhere.  It's not 
> immediately clear to me that this change would be more impactful
> than most others, but I'm certainly interested in any real-life
> experiences to the contrary...

Good point.  I wrote before thinking thoroughly.  I hope this is better.

I had one concern; that users not be surprised by make's behavior -
thus the version number change and a forked source base, with the new
major version as one branch and the old lexing behavior in another
branch.   Really bad idea.  I shouldn't post so soon after waking up.

If the new lexing/encoding behavior is turned off by default, and only
explicitly enabled, users are safe from a quiet behavior change, which
removes my concern.

Bill


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