Re: Problems with echo. (echo period)

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 10:18:13AM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>On 24 April 2007 10:11, Benoit Sigoure wrote:
>>Quoting Dave Korn <address@hidden>:
>>>On 24 April 2007 07:43, Benoit Sigoure wrote:
>>>>and the whole community will benefit from this very slight improvement.
>>>
>>>Nope, only the minority of win32/cmd.exe users.  An awful lot of people
>>>never use make with any other than a POSIX shell....
>>>
>>
>>Yes, well, we're discussing on the make-*w32* ML, what did you expect?
>
>Well, yes, but the code change involves anybody.
>
>>That's still quite a lot of people anyway...  Many people (like me)
>>have to port/compile their projects on Windows (unfortunately).
>>
>>Given the cost of the improvement, I think it's worth the effort (2
>>extra lines in a C file).
>
>It gets to be a problem when a project accumulates many many years
>worth of "just 2 extra lines for an ad-hoc fix".  I'm not strongly for
>or against.

There's that plus the fact that the whole reason for this, AFAICT, is to
somehow make your makefile output a blank line.  Is that really a common
enough task worth the cost of maintaining a kludge?

Then there's the added support cost of answering questions like "Well,
you already added a dot to echo, what's the harm of adding a 'dir.',
too?"

To me, this clearly falls into the domain of "do it the right way or
don't do it at all".  If there were hundreds of people asking for this
feature I might feel differently but given that this is the first time
I've seen this particular problem surface in nine months of monitoring
this mailing list, I don't see why we should add a kludge here.

cgf