On Saturday 2009-02-28 11:16, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: >> Modern Automake does support appending. But only appending to a >> variable that has already been set. > >Yes. This is done primarily to be able to diagnose typos, e.g., > foolish = > foo1ish += bar >[...] >Is it worth the hassle? It's certainly a trade-off: >- more work due to required initializations of all variables, >- OTOH typos in variables can have rather subtle implications, > esp. if those variables are of the "magic automake" kind.
- "+=" could append to variables implicitly defined by make (the horror!). Though this does not happen with automake, users could walk into a trip when they have to write a manual Makefile (e.g. Makefile.in) without the use of Automake.
