Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 17:34:30 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: freebsd-standards@bostonradio.org Cc: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> Subject: Re: 'make clean' vs /bin/sh, posix behavior? Message-ID: <p05101002b7556d02b66a@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <p05100e16b737c14ab4e6@[128.113.24.47]> References: <p05100e16b737c14ab4e6@[128.113.24.47]>
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Back on May 28th, in the freebsd-hackers thread about:
Re: 'make clean' vs automake vs /bin/sh, which to fix?
I (garance) wrote:
>It seems to me that if 'make' is executing a single command
>line which is made up of multiple unix commands, it should
>only care about the FINAL command status, and not the status
>of each of the interim commands. That is just my gut feeling
>though, I can't tell if the documentation really spells out
>what is to happen in this case.
>
>So, we could fix [my described problem] by:
> 1) changing /bin/sh
> 2) changing make not to call /bin/sh with -e
> 3) [...dumb option...]
>
>Me, I'm inclined to go with the some fix to the evaltree routine
>in /bin/sh, [...fixing bug in '-e'. This is already done...]
>
>While I do wonder about 'make' calling '/bin/sh -e', I am
>less comfortable with committing that change myself, as
>there probably are makefiles which do assume the e-style
>behavior when handling multiple commands in a command-line.
>Perhaps we should update the documentation for 'make' to
>explicitly mention how 'make' handles such command-lines.
A pretty similar topic came up on the 'subversion' mailing list,
and At 4:20 PM -0400 6/19/01, Paul D. Smith wrote:
> + The difference I believe you're alluding to is whether make
> + invokes /bin/sh with the -e option by default or not.
> +
> + Many (most) versions of make do actually invoke with the -e
> + option, always. However, the POSIX.2 definition of make is
> + very clear on this point, that make should invoke
> + "/bin/sh -c ...".
> +
> + GNU make follows the POSIX standard in this, rather than
> + tradition. That's why GNU make doesn't fail immediately.
> [in the example discussed on the subversion mailing list]
> +
> + The simple way to ensure that all versions of make behave the
> + same is to tell the shell explicitly what to do with the e
> + flag; for example if you want to ignore errors in all versions
> + of make you can use "set +e" to disable the "e" flag if it's
> + set:
> +
> + set +e; \
> + echo "START: $$progbase" >> $$logfile ; \
> + ...
> +
> + I think that's pretty portable.
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul D. Smith <psmith@gnu.org> Find some GNU make tips at:
> http://www.gnu.org http://www.paulandlesley.org/gmake/
So, I'm wondering if that's what POSIX really wants as the standard
behavior. I don't THINK we want to change the behavior of our own
'make', but I do wonder if we should at least document this detail
in the man page for 'make'.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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