> Roland, I think you overstate the seriousness of the problem.
... and I think you are understating it.
> There are not many makefiles that both define multiple pattern rules
> and rely on their order for selection.
Mine do. Not that I realized it until things didn't work as I
expected, after which I had to juggle the order until everything
worked. The colleague who's inherited maintenance of that may have a
hard time sorting that out - juggling the order won't help him, with
the new rule. Either he's lucky and it works, or he's not and we're
going to have to make drastic changes to get round it - which
management isn't going to like, because I'm really meant to be doing
other things these days, not dabbling in black magic with my old
apprentice. Telling our colleagues not to upgrade to 3.82 may be the
only practical option.
The down-side of the new rule is that there's no way to bypass it: the
longest-stem rule is always going to select the longest-stem rule
applicable, there's nothing the makefile author can do to cause the
less-frequently-desired rule to be applied, when it happens to be what
they need. The order-dependency was kludgy, but at least I only had
to juggle the order to get it all to work.
The problem with a rule that is "what people usually prefer" is,
generally, that you have to think quite carefully about how the
UNusual case is to be handled. It's like buildings with steps up to
the entrance - most people find that nicer to use than a sloped ramp,
but those who do can still use a sloped ramp, while those who simply
cannot use stairs need a sloped ramp !
Eddy.
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