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Re: Problems with echo. (echo period)


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: Problems with echo. (echo period)
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:10:36 +0300

> Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:34:52 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Aaron Shatters <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> No, for the cmd.exe shell, echo"" doesn't seem to be working.

It does for me, see my other message, and it does for Dave.  I'm at a
loss why it doesn't for you.

> As for why it is useful to be able to use this feature... consider the 
> following:
> 
> @echo $(VARIABLE)
> 
> will print "ECHO is off." if VARIABLE is undefined
> 
> I suppose that you could do
> 
> ifdef VARIABLE
> @echo $(VARIABLE)
> endif

Why not just

  @echo VARIABLE is "$(VARIABLE)"

?  This is portable enough, I think, and doesn't suffer from the "echo
is on" problem.

> And if the next question is, why is this so important?... the answer is... 
> it's not because there are probably 12 different ways to work your way around 
> it, however, it is useful to be able to use the shell, in all of it's glory, 
> without trying to invent hacks to get around some make limitation.  It's also 
> useful to be compatible with other make utilites as much as possible.

Sorry to disappoint you, but my experience teaches me that if you want
Makefiles that work with several different flavors of Make, on
different OSes and with different shells, you will end up working
around problems anyhow.  It just isn't worth the hassle to solve this
one small and marginal problem and leave the gazillion of others.

> Is there any disagreement that this is a limitation of make, and that it 
> probably should be fixed?

It's a limitation of trying to get incompatible shells and OSes behave
the same.  It cannot be helped.




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