Re: [RFC PATCH v2 1/6] t0080: turn t-basic unit test into a helper

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2024 at 01:27:11PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Josh Steadmon <steadmon@google.com> writes:
> 
> > I see this line in the docs [1]: "As with wildcard expansion in rules,
> > the results of the wildcard function are sorted". GNU Make has restored
> > the sorted behavior of $(wildcard) since 2018 [2]. I'll leave the sort
> > off for now, but if folks feel like we need to support older versions of
> > `make`, I'll add it back.
> >
> > [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Wildcard-Function.html
> > [2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?52076
> 
> Thanks for digging.  I thought I was certain that woldcard is sorted
> and stable and was quite perplexed when I could not find the mention
> in a version of doc I had handy ("""This is Edition 0.75, last
> updated 19 January 2020, of 'The GNU Make Manual', for GNU 'make'
> version 4.3.""").

Likewise (mine is the latest version in Debian unstable). The change to
sort comes from their[1] eedea52a, which was in GNU make 4.2.90. But the
matching documentation change didn't happen until 5b993ae, which was
4.3.90 in late 2021. So that explains the mystery.

Those dates imply to me that we should keep the $(sort), though. Six
years is not so long in distro timescales, especially given that Debian
unstable is on a 4-year-old version. (And if we did want to get rid of
it, certainly we should do so consistently across the Makefile in a
separate patch).

-Peff

[1] commit ids are from https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/make.git