[erlang-questions] Erlang and autoconf/make

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Romain Lenglet wrote:
	> But I believed that pattern rules were a GNU Make'ism?

Pupeno <pupeno@REDACTED> asked:
	Can any BSDer confirm this ?

I don't run BSD on any of my machines.
However, I *can* tell you that
(1) On Alpha OSF V5.1, the manual page for 'make' mentions % in only
    two contexts:  the shell prompt for sample commands and various
    NLS escapes in MANPATH.
(2) I have an on-line copy of the Single Unix Specification, Version 3.
    The description of 'make' says "There are two types of rule:
	1. Inference rules, which have one target name with at least
	   one period ('.') and no slash ('/')
	2. Target rules, which can have more than one target name."
    No pattern rules.  In fact the rationale at the end says
       "Consideration was given to adding emtarules to the POSIX
        make.  This would make %.o: %.c the same as .c.o:.  This is quite
        useful and available from some vendors, but it would cause too
        many changes to this make to support,.  It would have introduced
        rule chaining and new substitution rules.  However, the rules
        for target names have been set to reserve the '%' and '"' characters.
	These are traditionally used to implement metarules and quoting of
	target names, respectively.  Implementors are strongly encouraged
	to use these characters only for these purposes."

If the Automake people didn't do their design with a copy of the SUS
(or POSIX.2 or SVID or ...) in front of them, I will be very surprised.