Re: Should this makefile really hang make?

[Paul Smith]

Gak.  This is a big mess.  Handling of : and % in second expansion
situations is very tricky.

On Tue, 2011-11-15 at 13:30 -0800, Bryan Ischo wrote:
> .SECONDEXPANSION:
> all: foo.a
> %.a: $$(@:%.a=%.o)

This is a bug due to make trying to parse the result of the second
expansion as if it were a library reference (e.g., "libfoo(a.o)" etc.)
If you change this to use {} instead of () in the braces, then you won't
get the infinite loop, but:

  $ cat Makefile
  .SECONDEXPANSION:
  %.a: $${@:.a=.o} ; ar cr $@ $^

  $ make
  Makefile:2: *** target pattern contains no `%'.  Stop.

Make is mis-parsing the extra ":" here, not realizing that it's part of
the variable reference, and interpreting this as a static pattern rule.

> .SECONDEXPANSION:
> %.a: $$(patsubst %.a,%.o,$$@)
>      ar cr $@ $^

The problem here is that make interprets the first "%" as part of the
pattern rule, and expands it.  So for "foo.a", make first expands the %
in the prerequisites list to "foo", and then it expands the function:

  $(patsubst foo.a,%.o,foo.a)

Since there's no pattern in the first string, there's no stem and "%" is
used verbatim, so we convert "foo.a" to "%.o".

The issue is it's not obvious how to fix this.  You could say that "%"
inside variable references should not be considered for the stem of a
pattern rule, but in other places we WANT the "%" to be replaced; for
example:

  foo_OBJS = obj1.o obj2.o obj3.o
  .SECONDEXPANSION:
  %.a: $$(%_OBJS)

Here we want "%" to be replaced by the stem before we expand the
variable, so we get "$(foo_OBJS)" and expand that.  Of course in this
situation you can just use:

  %.a: $$($$*_OBJS)

instead if you want... but there is special handling of stems in the
context of directories that the latter doesn't allow for.

Maybe we need to allow escaping of "%"; something like:

  %.a: $$(patsubst \%.a,\%.o,$$@)

These areas need more consideration, to be sure.

-- 
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