I need support with a planned POSIX make extension

[(Joerg Schilling) <schily%schily.net@localhost>]

Hi, 

I am currently trying to get an orthogonal extension into POSIX make in order 
to have at least an orthogonal variant as a choice instead of the incompatible
GNU make extensions called:

	:= that has been standardized in POSIX as ::= and that creates a 
	   different type of make macro with different behavior

	+= from GNU make that is incompatible to the much older += from
	   SunPro Make. The incompatibility is that if a make macro has been
	   created by the GNU := (POSIX ::=) instead of the standard 
	   assignment operaror =, += first expands the right side before 
	   appending the expanded result to the macro.

	The different type of macros created with the GNU := is not
	expanded at use time.

The incompatible behavior from GNU make has the following problems:

1)	expansion always could be prevented in a standard compliant way
	by using $$(MACRO), instead of using a different macro type.

2)	large makefiles that make heavy use of the include directive 
	become highly unpredictable because you cannot know what a +=
	operator will do, since the first definition of the related make
	macro is most likely in a different include file.

	I already filed a bug against POSIX for that and POSIX now recommends
	to include at least one lower case letter in the name of a make
	macro created via GNU make := (POSIX ::=).

3)	The GNU make documentation is written so badly that most people
	who use := do not know that this causes unexpected behavior with
	the += operator.

In order to have at least the choice of an orthogonal way of doing what 
people expect, I defined and implemented two new operators:

	:::=	Assigns to a make macro by first expanding the right
		side of the assignment, but without creating a different
		type of make macro.

	+:=	Appends to a make macro by first expanding the right
		side of the assignment, regardless of the type of the
		make macro that is to the left.

and I filed a bug against POSIX to enhance the standard to include these
new operators, see:

	https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1471

BTW: I am the author and maintainer of smake and I am the current maintainer
of SunPro Make as well. Both programs are part of the schilytools package
and already include support for the new operators.

The time to implement the new operators was 1-4 hours for each of the make
implementations, so this is a really cheap extension.

Given that bmake otherwise behaves like smake for :=, I hope that *BSD could
be willing to support my enhancement.

So my question is: would you be willing to implement support for :::= and +:=
into bmake and publish that will to the POSIX bug tracking system?

Jörg

-- 
EMail:joerg%schily.net@localhost                  Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
					Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/