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Date:      Sat, 13 Mar 2004 13:32:06 +0100
From:      Matthias Andree <ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de>
To:        Oliver Eikemeier <eikemeier@fillmore-labs.com>
Cc:        Matthias Andree <ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de>
Subject:   Re: ports/64037 and the alleged && -> ; failure from March 2002
Message-ID:  <m3y8q5orll.fsf@merlin.emma.line.org>
In-Reply-To: <4052E92D.7050000@fillmore-labs.com> (Oliver Eikemeier's message of "Sat, 13 Mar 2004 11:57:49 %2B0100")
References:  <20040313002807.GA13745@merlin.emma.line.org> <40525BE9.2050208@fillmore-labs.com> <20040313102423.GA6018@merlin.emma.line.org> <4052E92D.7050000@fillmore-labs.com>

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Oliver Eikemeier <eikemeier@fillmore-labs.com> writes:

> GNU make is not used for ports Makefiles, only for the ones in the
> distribution, and you don't want to Patch Them All(tm), do you?

perl -ple 's/;/\&\&/g;' `find /usr/ports -iname 'makefile*'` # :*)

Seriously, whether we use gmake or make for ports does not matter,
neither documents the "make passes -e to /bin/sh" behaviour, hence it
must not be relied on under any circumstances.

Robustness considerations mandate using && over ; when cmd1 is a
prerequisite for cmd2 in a cmd1 && cmd2 AND-list. Some day, someone
considers the whole command line isn't that important, prepends a '-'
(making make suppress the -e) and cmd2 gets executed when cmd1 failed in
a cmd1;cmd2 sequence.

Seriously, any Makefile that is touched by a committer or maintainer
should have the ";" changed to "&&" if "&&" is needed to make the thing
work without -e.

> Finally I'm not sure if simply ignoring the following command is the
> right thing to do. I can construct an example where this is fatal too,
> but IMHO all such examples would be pathological.

Sure you can (but then we have OR-lists with "||" :-P)

I'm not saying that all ';' must be '&&', but in the common "cd, then
execute a command" case, it really ought to be.

-- 
Matthias Andree

Encrypt your mail: my GnuPG key ID is 0x052E7D95



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