Hello, * Vincent Lefevre wrote on Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 04:19:21PM CET: > I have a few comments about Section 7.2.2 "Utilities in Makefiles" of > the GNU Coding Standards.
FWIW, this was spawned by <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.bugs/5961>. > * "Stick to the generally supported options for these programs." > is vague and misleading. People might think that POSIX options are > OK despite the given example ("mkdir -p", where -p is specified by > POSIX). I even saw developers using non-POSIX options! Could this > paragraph be more specific? Maybe it should link to the Autoconf manual section about portable shell scripts. But mentioning to generally not assume more than POSIX except in a few well-known-portable cases is probably a good idea. FWIW, mkdir -p is listed because it is not parallel build-safe on some non-free systems. > Also, concerning the "test" utility, the following should probably > be added: > > With the "test" utility, avoid ambiguity. Even though the behavior > is specified by POSIX, many implementations behave differently. > For instance, to test whether the length of a string is zero or > not, use an explicit "-z" or "-n". This could be elegantly solved with above: a link to <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/html_node/Portable-Shell.html> which covers this and many more issues. Cheers, Ralf
