Re: Which make-related variables are passed to subprocesses

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2018-04-20 at 23:33 +0200, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> Well, perhaps the way I designed things is wrong, but it turns out that
> in my case it would make a lot of sense. I am developiing a test driver
> which needs to invoke make to build some tests. Ideally it should invoke
> the same make that was used to invoke it, that's why having the MAKE
> variable would be useful. Well I passed it explicitly to things do work
> now.

If you need to run a program that needs to invoke make, then yes you
should pass it explicitly to that program.  Or you can ask make to
export the MAKE variable by adding:

  export MAKE

to your makefile.

Normally, sub-makes are invoked directly, like:

  recurse:
          $(MAKE) -C subdir

or whatever.  In this situation there's no need for the MAKE variable
to be added to the environment of the sub-process by default.