ports/64037 and the alleged && -> ; failure from March 2002

[Matthias Andree]

Oliver Eikemeier <eikemeier at fillmore-labs.com> writes:

> GNU make is not used for ports Makefiles, only for the ones in the
> distribution, and you don't want to Patch Them All(tm), do you?

perl -ple 's/;/\&\&/g;' `find /usr/ports -iname 'makefile*'` # :*)

Seriously, whether we use gmake or make for ports does not matter,
neither documents the "make passes -e to /bin/sh" behaviour, hence it
must not be relied on under any circumstances.

Robustness considerations mandate using && over ; when cmd1 is a
prerequisite for cmd2 in a cmd1 && cmd2 AND-list. Some day, someone
considers the whole command line isn't that important, prepends a '-'
(making make suppress the -e) and cmd2 gets executed when cmd1 failed in
a cmd1;cmd2 sequence.

Seriously, any Makefile that is touched by a committer or maintainer
should have the ";" changed to "&&" if "&&" is needed to make the thing
work without -e.

> Finally I'm not sure if simply ignoring the following command is the
> right thing to do. I can construct an example where this is fatal too,
> but IMHO all such examples would be pathological.

Sure you can (but then we have OR-lists with "||" :-P)

I'm not saying that all ';' must be '&&', but in the common "cd, then
execute a command" case, it really ought to be.

-- 
Matthias Andree

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