make versus _MANPAGE

[Oliver Eikemeier]

Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, Oliver Eikemeier wrote:
> 
>>>I am currently fighting a very nasty problem where a construct involving
>>>.for in a Makefile works as expected, depending on whether I use it before
>>>.include <bsd.port.post.mk> or after.
>>
>>[...]
>>.for evaluates its arguments immediately, not delayed. _MANPAGES is
>>defined in bsd.port.pre.mk, so it is only defined *afterwards*. Works
>>as advertised.
> 
> Thanks for the explanation!
> 
> So this _never_ could have worked, and we were just lucky in that none
> of our users noticed/reported the problem before?
Where do you use it? I *strongly* suggest that you look for an alternative,
this scheme may break if bsd.port.mk is reorganized.

> (Where could I have found the semantics of .for documented?  The make
> man page was not very helpful.)

  http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/make2/

  file:///usr/share/doc/psd/12.make/paper.ascii.gz

  IEEE Std 1003.2-1992 (POSIX.2 Shell & Tools)

Sorry, make is not well documented in the base system.

-Oliver