Re: make chokes on rules with colons in it

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

     jm> I've been trying to build GNU mailutils for Debian inside
     jm> svn-buildpackage, which copies the source to a build area
     jm> using the debian version as the path. Debian version had been
     jm> until now "20031103-1", for example. Now, it's something like
     jm> "1:0.4+20031231-1", and make doesn't like this, due to the
     jm> colon in the path.

   Correct.  You can't include ":" as part of a target or prerequisite
   name in GNU make (at least not reliably).

Then this should be documented in the manual.  Here is a patch.

2004-01-03  Alfred M. Szmidt  <address@hidden>

        * doc/make.texi (Rule Syntax): Document that `:' aren't
        allowed in target or prerequisite names.

--- doc/make.texi       Sat Jan  3 16:05:52 2004
+++ doc/make.texi       Sat Jan  3 16:19:19 2004
@@ -1629,6 +1629,13 @@
 appear on the same line, with a semicolon.  Either way, the effect is the
 same.  @xref{Commands, ,Writing the Commands in Rules}.
 
address@hidden colon (@code{:}), in target names
address@hidden @code{:}, in target names
address@hidden colon (@code{:}), in prerequisite names
address@hidden @code{:}, in prerequisite names
+Including a colon, @code{:}, as part of a target or prerequisite name
+is not supported by GNU make.
+
 @cindex dollar sign (@code{$}), in rules
 @cindex @code{$}, in rules
 @cindex rule, and @code{$}

Cheers...