Limitations of Make
===================
Make itself suffers a great number of limitations, only a few of
which being listed here. First of all, remember that since commands are
executed by the shell, all its weaknesses are inherited...
`$<'
POSIX says that the `$<' construct in makefiles can be used only
in inference rules and in the `.DEFAULT' rule; its meaning in
ordinary rules is unspecified. Solaris 8's `make' for instance
will replace it with the argument.
Leading underscore in macro names
Some Make don't support leading underscores in macro names, such
as on NEWS-OS 4.2R.
$ cat Makefile
_am_include = #
_am_quote =
all:; @echo this is test
$ make
Make: Must be a separator on rules line 2. Stop.
$ cat Makefile2
am_include = #
am_quote =
all:; @echo this is test
$ make -f Makefile2
this is test
`VPATH'
Don't use it! For instance any assignment to `VPATH' causes Sun
`make' to only execute the first set of double-colon rules.