Re: soring of intput files

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2014-11-19 at 14:58 +0100, Olaf Hering wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, Paul Smith wrote:
> 
> > You don't show how the values of the individual variables like
> > MARKDOWNSRC-y etc. are obtained, so we can't say anything about the
> > order of those values.  However whatever order they have will be
> > preserved by the above statement.
> 
> They are obtained with a pattern like that:
> 
> MARKDOWNSRC-y := $(wildcard misc/*.markdown)
> 
> So in the end the order seems to be set here. What does wildcard do?

The wildcard function is described in the manual:
http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Wildcard-Function.html

It will read the contents of the directory and return values that match
the shell globbing character.  So, this is returned in directory order
which is essentially random.

If you want things sorted you either need to list them explicitly in the
order you want them in, or else use the $(sort ...) function.