rocky/remake release_4.3+dbg-1.5

Pig Boy

on GitHub

Rebase code on GNU Make 4.3.

This was made possible by Thomas Kupper (boretom) who did all the heavy lifting while rocky looked on in amazement.

Thomas also added OS/X CI testing, and tested on the BSD-ish platforms.

With this release, we've started redoing the texinfo documentation in sphinx and put on readthedocs. Since sphinx supports output into LaTeX, TeXinfo, pdf, epub, and info as well as HTML, the TeXinfo document will be removed when the sphinx documentation is more stable. I expect the in next release to work on this.

Similarly, you'll see that README.md has been redone and includes screencasts. The install docs have also been corrected and expanded.

New and Changed Features

• --search parent -- I really like this one.
• --tasks -- the definition of a "tasks" has been simplified.
  Now, it is simply a target that has a description comment (#:) before it.
  After many years of using this myself, I highly encourage people to start using description comments more.
  Output from running remake --tasks is nicer because we use spaces to align columns rather than tabs.

Debugger Changes

• Commands with file expansion now use glob(), not word_expand() (Thomas did this too).
  Previously source used to POSIX.1-2008 wordexp(), but this is not available on BSD-ish systems. glob() is more general, and GNU make ships with its own glob() function when none is provided in the underlying OS library.
• load command added eval command removed.
  eval never worked and it attempted to be the same thing as load; load is the gdb name.
• $(debugger) function fixed.
  This function gave an virtual memory exhausted on exit. This has been fixed. The required parameter for this function, a tag name, is now shown on entry
• info tasks has been added. It is basically the same thing as remake --tasks
• Description lines are now shown on in info targets and list commands
• The debugger now disallows any "running" command inside post-mortem debugging
• Help as shown inside the debugger has been greatly expanded and more closely matches the sphinx docs.
  We now show in help text the short command name and any aliases attached to the command