Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!SAUNA.HUT.FI!jkp
From: jkp@SAUNA.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug
Subject: GNU make
Message-ID: <8908230537.AA02010@cs.hut.fi>
Date: 23 Aug 89 05:37:02 GMT
Distribution: gnu
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
Lines: 27

In article <890821-112651-1301@Xerox>, Leisner.Henr@XEROX (Marty) writes:
>SunOS makes only puts the variables defined in the makefile, the command
>line or inherited in the environment in the child's environment.  GNUmake
>puts everything into the environment, even variables never referenced (i.e.
>like:
>F77=$(FC)
>F77FLAGS=$(FFLAGS)
>FC=f77

Oh yes, this reminds me of the misfeature I ran into a few days ago.
Some program (I don't remember which) had in it's rules lines like:

SHELL = /bin/sh
1 = 1

(for the manual page extension).

Then there was a shell script ran in the makefile.  The shell bombs
with `1=1: is not an identifier' on at least SVR2 and BSD 4.3 because
it doesn't like environment variables with numbers.  (By the way, Sun
seems to have changed (fixed?) this, their /bin/sh as of Sunos 4.0.1
doesn't complain about the environment variable 1.

So perhaps the make behaviour isn't desirable, at least it can cause
harm in some rare causes.

//Jyrki