On Jun 19, 6:58am, mar...@duskware.de (Martin Husemann) wrote: -- Subject: Re: CVS commit: src/usr.bin/make
| There was a discussion way back, exactly about what the default | behaviour should be: | | http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-toolchain/2012/08/06/msg001900.html | | If we now want to change the default (as you did), we should at least | have a follow-up discussion on tech-toolchain. I just read all 4 messages and there was no strong consensus either way: Iain: I don't like the thought of changing the result of options that are already present, since it is not beyond conceivable that doing so would break somebodys setup somewhere.. but I agree that -V can be a bit irritating, and providing a modifier to cause it to produce the expanded value directly does sound useful... joerg: My usage distribution is far less screwed into either direction, so I am not too sure about changing it. simon: Being able to get the raw value of a variable is definitely useful, but I'm wondering if it makes a good default. 99% of the time I end up doing: make -V VAR make -V '${VAR} I ask again: Do you want to have 'make -V VAR' do something useful by default, or do you want it to produce debugging output because this is what it did historically? I am convinced that this behavior is an accident; whoever wrote the code thought that Var_Value() returns the value of a variable, and did not realize that it returns the unexpanded value (because it worked for the cases she/he checked). It is my fault because I I introduced -V in 1.31 in 1996 without realizing that. christos