[HEADS UP] GNU make 3.82

[Ade Lovett]

On Mar 10, 2011, at 13:24 , Doug Barton wrote:
> Can you give us an idea of how many ports we're talking about? Rather than having 2 gmake ports (which is likely to last for a very long time, "best laid plans" aside) can we at least explore the idea of fixing things that are broken to work with 3.82 first? My suggestion is to do the -exp run, then post here and to maintainers of broken ports directly and see what a reasonable time frame would be to get things fixed the right way first.

Preliminary runs show ~50 ports that break with 3.82, some of them unfortunately being dependencies for a reasonable number of others.  An -exp has already been run, though there were a number of false positives for whatever reason.

There will absolutely _not_ be two gmake ports for anything more than a suitable deprecation period (if it is determined to move ahead) or for perhaps a month (specifically note that devel/gmake381 is marked IGNORE and not attached to the tree, so anyone trying to use it will have ... problems) if it's too much in the way of hacking.

> My understanding is that there is _currently_ no pressure to get gmake upgraded, so at least exploring the idea of doing it without a kludge seems reasonable to me, although I'm happy to be proven wrong.

The "kludge", in terms of actually testing things to get empirical data, rather than hand-waving about the sky falling, is ~4 lines of code in bsd.port.mk.  We have a plan, we're going to get the results of that plan, and then do some analysis on it.  Working closely with the pkgsrc tree that already _is_ at gmake-3.82

You may find a more productive approach would be to wander over to the gnumake mailing list, and ask why such a massive amount of backwards incompatibility was introduced in a minor version upgrade.  Of course, that's entirely your prerogative.  In the meantime, I along with a few others are actually going to _do_ the work involved in _testing_ the _possibility_ of this instead of sitting in our armchairs.

-aDe