Re: Differing behaviour between make 3.81 and 4.0

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2014-06-01 at 06:36 +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Paul Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > This is definitely not right.  GNU make 4.0's behavior is correct.
> 
> Yes I understand that. My question was whether this was:
> 
> 1) an intentional bugfix for 4.0, or
> 
> 2) something good that occurred out of code cleanup or such so which
> is expected to continue in future versions, or
> 
> 3) a serendipitous occurrence in which case effort needs to be taken
> to ensure that it continues in future versions.

I don't know the answer to that.  It doesn't ring any bells but 3.81 was
released 8 years ago.  You can try spelunking in the ChangeLog or the
Savannah bug list, and/or use git bisect or something to find out
exactly when it was fixed, and/or see if the incorrect behavior is
covered by the current regression test suite.

All I can say for sure is that the current behavior is correct and if it
changed back to the old behavior that would be a regression and would
need to be fixed.