GNU make NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 28 February 1996 Copyright (C) 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end for copying conditions. Please send GNU make bug reports to bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu. Version 3.75 * The directory messages printed by `-w' and implicitly in sub-makes, are now omitted if Make runs no commands and has no other messages to print. * Make now detects files that for whatever reason have modification times in the future and gives an error. Files with such impossible timestamps can result from unsynchronized clocks, or archived distributions containing bogus timestamps; they confuse Make's dependency engine thoroughly. Version 3.73 * Converted to use Autoconf version 2, so `configure' has some new options. See INSTALL for details. * You can now send a SIGUSR1 signal to Make to toggle printing of debugging output enabled by -d, at any time during the run. Version 3.72 * DJ Delorie has ported Make to MS-DOS using the GO32 extender. He is maintaining the DOS port, not the GNU Make maintainer; please direct bugs and questions for DOS to . MS-DOS binaries are available for FTP from oak.oakland.edu:pub/msdos/djgpp. * The `MAKEFLAGS' variable (in the environment or in a makefile) can now contain variable definitions itself; these are treated just like command-line variable definitions. Make will automatically insert any variable definitions from the environment value of `MAKEFLAGS' or from the command line, into the `MAKEFLAGS' value exported to children. The `MAKEOVERRIDES' variable previously included in the value of `$(MAKE)' for sub-makes is now included in `MAKEFLAGS' instead. As before, you can reset `MAKEOVERRIDES' in your makefile to avoid putting all the variables in the environment when its size is limited. * If `.DELETE_ON_ERROR' appears as a target, Make will delete the target of a rule if it has changed when its commands exit with a nonzero status, just as when the commands get a signal. * The automatic variable `$+' is new. It lists all the dependencies like `$^', but preserves duplicates listed in the makefile. This is useful for linking rules, where library files sometimes need to be listed twice in the link order. * You can now specify the `.IGNORE' and `.SILENT' special targets with dependencies to limit their effects to those files. If a file appears as a dependency of `.IGNORE', then errors will be ignored while running the commands to update that file. Likewise if a file appears as a dependency of `.SILENT', then the commands to update that file will not be printed before they are run. (This change was made to conform to POSIX.2.) Version 3.71 * The automatic variables `$(@D)', `$(%D)', `$(*D)', `$(