[bug #51974] call on multiline (define/endef) behavior not well-documented

[Paul D. Smith]

Update of bug #51974 (project make):

              Item Group:                     Bug => Documentation          
                 Summary: multiline (define/endef) containing target-specific
assignments causes errors in /bin/sh => call on multiline (define/endef)
behavior not well-documented

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Follow-up Comment #5:

For J. Hart: I do also recommend that you ask questions first on the
address@hidden or address@hidden mailing lists to be sure the behavior
you're seeing is really incorrect, before filing bugs here.

The make parser doesn't "go backwards": it will first read a line, then expand
the line, then interpret the line.  It doesn't go back after expanding the
line to re-interpret the newline characters, so the entire results of
expansion is treated as a single logical line by the make parser.  I did try,
when first implementing eval, to instead just have things re-interpreted after
expansion always but it ended up being a real mess.  Requiring an explicit
eval is not always intuitive at first but it actually makes things much more
coherent in general.

I do agree that the behavior could be better documented so I've modified this
to a doc bug.

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