Re: Need help with GNU make: "No rule to make target"

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2013-10-14 at 17:37 +0000, Burri, Jeremy wrote:
> Does anyone understand why using substitution would result in the
> dropping of the ')'?

This is a bug.  I think it has been fixed in newer versions of GNU make
(it looks familiar to me).

> I was going to request an upgrade of GNU Make on the system I am using
> (3.81 -> 3.82), in hopes that it will address this issue. However, I
> read that 3.82 breaks backwards compatibility in many places without
> providing much reason to upgrade.  Do you agree with this statement?

No.

You can examine the NEWS file for GNU make, where all new features and
backward-compatibility issues are described:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/make.git/tree/NEWS

It's unlikely that your makefiles will fall afoul of any of those edge
cases.

As for 4.0, you might consider trying it out.  Yes, it's recently been
released but it has been in testing since the summer.  And, there are
known issues with 3.82 that have been fixed there (83 bugs were fixed
between 3.82 and 4.0).