[bug #40657] Suffix rules and prerequisites

[Martin Dorey]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #40657 (project make):

This was revisited in
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/make.git/commit/?id=3b5e47b2e2904884a9d853848be3348b7cdd4f8a
largely thanks to a report from Dennis Clarke about building FreeBSD packages
at the end of https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-make@gnu.org/msg11961.html

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GNU make 4.3 released!

[Paul Smith]

GNU make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and
other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

You can learn more at: http://www.gnu.org/software/make/


The next stable release of GNU make, 4.3, is available now for download:

d5c40e7bd1e97a7404f5d3be982f479a  make-4.3.tar.lz (1.3M)
fc7a67ea86ace13195b0bce683fd4469  make-4.3.tar.gz (2.3M)

You can obtain a copy from:   http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/
You can choose a nearby mirror:   http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/make/
A list of mirror sites is available:  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

- NEWS 

Version 4.3 (19 Jan 2020)

A complete list of bugs fixed in this version is available here:

https://sv.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?group=make_id=111_release_id=108=custom

* WARNING: Backward-incompatibility!
  Number signs (#) appearing inside a macro reference or function invocation
  no longer introduce comments and should not be escaped with backslashes:
  thus a call such as:
foo := $(shell echo '#')
  is legal.  Previously the number sign needed to be escaped, for example:
foo := $(shell echo '\#')
  Now this latter will resolve to "\#".  If you want to write makefiles
  portable to both versions, assign the number sign to a variable:
H := \#
foo := $(shell echo '$H')
  This was claimed to be fixed in 3.81, but wasn't, for some reason.
  To detect this change search for 'nocomment' in the .FEATURES variable.

* WARNING: Backward-incompatibility!
  Previously appending using '+=' to an empty variable would result in a value
  starting with a space.  Now the initial space is only added if the variable
  already contains some value.  Similarly, appending an empty string does not
  add a trailing space.

* NOTE: Deprecated behavior.
  Contrary to the documentation, suffix rules with prerequisites are being
  treated BOTH as simple targets AND as pattern rules.  Further, the
  prerequisites are ignored by the pattern rules.  POSIX specifies that in
  order to be a suffix rule there can be no prerequisites defined.  In this
  release if POSIX mode is enabled then rules with prerequisites cannot be
  suffix rules.  If POSIX mode is not enabled then the previous behavior is
  preserved (a pattern rule with no extra prerequisites is created) AND a
  warning about this behavior is generated:
warning: ignoring prerequisites on suffix rule definition
  The POSIX behavior will be adopted as the only behavior in a future release
  of GNU make so please resolve any warnings.

* New feature: Grouped explicit targets
  Pattern rules have always had the ability to generate multiple targets with
  a single invocation of the recipe.  It's now possible to declare that an
  explicit rule generates multiple targets with a single invocation.  To use
  this, replace the ":" token with "&:" in the rule.  To detect this feature
  search for 'grouped-target' in the .FEATURES special variable.
  Implementation contributed by Kaz Kylheku 

* New feature: .EXTRA_PREREQS variable
  Words in this variable are considered prerequisites of targets but they are
  not added to any of the automatic variable values when expanding the
  recipe.  This variable can either be global (applies to all targets) or
  a target-specific variable.  To detect this feature search for 'extra-prereqs'
  in the .FEATURES special variable.
  Implementation contributed by Christof Warlich 

* Makefiles can now specify the '-j' option in their MAKEFLAGS variable and
  this will cause make to enable that parallelism mode.

* GNU make will now use posix_spawn() on systems where it is available.
  If you prefer to use fork/exec even on systems where posix_spawn() is
  present, you can use the --disable-posix-spawn option to configure.
  Implementation contributed by Aron Barath 

* Error messages printed when invoking non-existent commands have been cleaned
  up and made consistent.

* The previous limit of 63 jobs under -jN on MS-Windows is now
  increased to 4095.  That limit includes the subprocess started by
  the $(shell) function.

* A new option --no-silent has been added, that cancels the effect of the
  -s/--silent/--quiet flag.

* A new option -E has been added as a short alias for --eval.

* All wildcard expansion within GNU make, including $(wildcard ...), will sort
  the results.  See https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?52076

* Interoperate with newer GNU libc and musl C runtime libraries.

* Performance improvements provided by Paolo Bonzini 

GNU make Developer News

* Import the GNU standard bootstrap script to replace the hand-rolled
  "make update" method for building code from a GNU make Git repository.

* Rework the source distribution to move source files into the src/*
  subdirectory.  This aligns with