Re: Problems with echo. (echo period)

[Aaron Shatters]

>> Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:14:31 -0700 (PDT)
>> From: Aaron Shatters <address@hidden>
>> 
>> As I noted previously, there are many workarounds to this problem.  I am 
>> interested in fixing the root cause.  After all of this investigation, do we 
>> have consensus that this is a limitation of make?  More importantly, do we 
>> have consensus that it should be >fixed?  We seem to have run out of reasons 
>> for not fixing this problem.
>
>No, I don't agree that this is a limitation of Make.  Make just
>invokes the shell built-in, and the shell built-in behaves like it
>does from the command line.
>
>I remain unconvinced that we should ``fix'' this just because this
>fundamental incompatibility between shells sometimes causes trouble in
>Makefiles that assume Posix `echo' where it isn't guaranteed to exist.

The problem is that Make is *not* invoking the shell built-in, therefore the 
command has no chance of behaving like it does from the command line.

I am confused as to what level of support Make is trying to achieve.  There are 
!unixy_shell conditions and dos cmd references all over the code.  What are the 
purposes of these if not to handle "fundamental incompatibilities between 
shells".  I don't understand where the point of disagreement is.  I understand 
that this is not a bug in Make, but, in my opinion, this is a perfectly 
reasonable enhancement.  Make knows about the existence of the windows shell 
'cmd.exe'.  It knows what the shell built-ins are, and it already handles this 
shell specially (for example, sh_cmds_dos in job.c).  What reasoning is there 
for excluding this functionality, when all of the other specifics associated 
with this shell are handled?

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