[bug #65273] Potential bug in the info function?

[Paul D. Smith]

Follow-up Comment #6, bug#65273 (group make):

I mean, there IS a reasonable way to get the same effect; I showed one
possibility in my response.  Yes, it looks slightly different but the result
is the same and there are no warnings.  Alternatively the Emacs makefiles
could disable these new warnings, if they are deemed more annoying than
helpful.

The problem is that at least 70% of the questions I've been answering on
StackOverflow in the last 5 years more or less boil down to misunderstanding
how make handles expansion, and a lot of those misunderstandings could be
helped if make complained about invalid variable names; for example:

all:
        echo $(git rev-parse HEAD)

will now show a warning (which can be either disabled or converted into an
error via options) because "git rev-parse HEAD" is not a valid variable name.

Leaving these checks disabled by default is not a good solution since the very
people who need this help most, will not benefit from them.

Of course we COULD add "special case" facilities for various projects' special
tricks but I'm not a fan of this approach.  And for this specific case, we
would be disabling warnings for situations like:

all:
        echo $ (CURDIR)

which admittedly is probably rare but still seems like it is a bizarre special
case to keep.


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