Make and dmake included with Solaris 10/Studio 11

Question

Subject: make and dmake included with Solaris 10/Studio 11
I've been working on a project where I'm converting makefiles that were originally developed for GNU make to utilize dmake.
The one issue I've been having is that one dynamic macro "$<" (insert dependency) doesn't seem to work as documented in the make man page either with dmake and make (in /usr/ccs/bin, or /usr/xpg4/bin). Here's a small snippet of what I'm trying to figure out:
#### Targets
oraSQL.c: oraSQL.pc
$(ORACLE_HOME)/bin/proc iname=$< dbms=v8 HOLD_CURSOR=NO RELEASE_CURSOR=YES ireclen=132 oreclen=132 select_error=no lines=yes sqlcheck=semantics xref=yes CODE=CPP ORACA=YES MODE=ORACLE MAXOPENCURSORS=50 userid=$(CONNSTR) When make executes this, it should replace the "$<" with "oraSQL.pc". This does work with GNU make. Now, I know that Solaris make and GNU make are definitely not the same; the manpage for Solaris make at the section titled "Dynamic Macros", clearly states that the same behavior should exist. Unfortunately with Solaris make, the macro is simply replaced with nothing.
Am I being a blockhead, or is there more too this that someone here might know about?
Thanks in advance;

Answer 1

First of all, this is a well known problem. It is not a bug, but a
difference in behavior between Sun "make" and GNU "make".
The behavior of Sun "make" is documented in man page,
and we cannot change the default behavior because this will
break the existing builds.
Here is how it is documented in make.1 man page:
$< The name of a dependency file, derived as if
selected for use with an implicit rule.
Second, this problem has been reported several times (see CR
6593262 for example) , and we addressed it - we provided
environment variable to specify the compatibility mode.
SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE=GNU
- compatibility with GNU "make"
Compatibility with GNU "make" is partially implemented, and
will be improved in next releases.
Here is an example how to set SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE
to avoid the problem, mentioned in CR 6593262:
1. This is what happens if SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE is not set.
% unsetenv SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE
% cat Makefile
## -- Makefile --
ECHO=/usr/bin/echo
all: this
that:
$(ECHO) "soccer"
this: that
$(ECHO) $<
% dmake -m parallel this
/usr/bin/echo "soccer"
soccer
/usr/bin/echo
2. Here is what happens if SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE=GNU
% setenv SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE GNU
% env | grep SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE
SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE=GNU
% dmake -m parallel this
/usr/bin/echo "soccer"
soccer
/usr/bin/echo that
that
So, in this case the output is identical to GNU make, correct?
Please, try to set the environment variable:
SUN_MAKE_COMPAT_MODE=GNU
and restart your build.
Thanks,
Nik