On Fri, Dec 03 2021, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Fri, 2021-12-03 at 11:08 +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: >> The motivation for this patch is that I've seen code like this in the >> wild: >> >> FILES = $(sort $(wildcard t*.sh)) >> >> I thought that it would be documented that that sort of thing was >> redundant, but I didn't find any mention of it in the manual. After >> some source spelunking I came up with this addition, which would have >> helped me when I consulted the manual. > > Originally it was not _guaranteed_ that wildcard yields sorted output. > > However, the output did happen to be sorted in older versions of GNU > make. In GNU make 3.82, that was changed to yield unsorted output. As > of GNU make 4.3, it was changed back and it is now guaranteed that > wildcard results are sorted: > > https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?52076 > > I thought that I had updated the documentation to make this guarantee > clear but perhaps I forgot? As far as the proposed update goes what I should have noted that individual arguments to "wildcard" expand to sorted globs, but as noted in the thread: $(wildcard ? ?) Will return e.g. "1 2 3 1 2 3". Would a patch that's updated to note that, and discusses the behavior in older versions be acceptable for inclusion? Unless there's some place where this is documented that I didn't spot...
