Re: Passing '$'-sequences through unmodified?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Philip,

* Philip A. Prindeville wrote on Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 05:35:37AM CEST:
> I have the following trivial automake sequence in

>  21 SYMFILES = $(srcdir)/uni.h $(shell $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -E $(srcdir)/header.c 
> | $    (AWK) -f $(srcdir)/script.awk)

> but when I run automake on this, I get:
> 
> Running automake...
> src/q2931/Makefile.am:21: shell $(CC: non-POSIX variable name
> src/q2931/Makefile.am:21: (probably a GNU make extension)

> The sequence:
[...]
> is perfectly valid gmake syntax.

Well, yes it is.  However, it is not conforming to POSIX make, nor to
portable make in practice.  That's the reason automake is complaining
about it.  Add to that the fact that automake cannot understand most of
GNU make-specific syntax, and it can be useful to see warnings here.

> And how do I get it to stop?

Add -Wno-portability to AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS in that Makefile.am, or to
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in configure.ac, or to the command line.

> Oddly, automake ends up generating the correct output:

Yeah, well, it's a warning only (unless you also use -Werror).

git master of Automake (thus 1.12) will make it easy to distinguish
warnings from errors (by prefixing them appropriately).

Cheers,
Ralf