Re: Problems with echo. (echo period)

[Aaron Shatters]

For everyone who has 'echo""' working, I have an explaination...

You probably have the echo.exe available in PATH somewhere.  Let me show you...

#########################################################
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.
P:\>set PATH=
P:\>echo""
'echo""' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
P:\>set PATH=C:\cygwin\bin
P:\>echo""

P:\>
#########################################################

Now, as for the solution suggested:  'echo "$(VARIABLE)"' where VARIABLE is 
undefined, it results in '""'.  So, sure, it doesn't print "ECHO is on.", but 
it does print the double quotes.

>>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.

I don't agree with the stance of not fixing one problem because it would pale in
comparison to the number of other problems.  Progress is a good thing, 
especially if
the cost of progress is small (ie. someone already patched the source).

I'm not looking to be compatible with an unreasonable number of different 
flavors of Make.
clearmake (part of ClearCase) has a gnu compatibility mode of operation.
This clearmake mode of operation supports 'echo.'.  We have scenarios where we
need to build software within a clearcase context using clearmake, and scenarios
where we need to build the same software outside of a clearcase context (audit 
context).
This is where mingw built gnu make comes in.  My goal is to use the same
makefiles for both clearmake with gnu compatibility mode and gnu make.
There is no reason why this should not work, which is why I'm requesting the 
gnu make change.

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