Bug in make or sh?

[Joe Kelsey]

We just received the new SGS from AT&T.  We also just put the sources
for the Documenter's Workbench on our system.  The make files for both
of these systems have a lot of if conditionals in them.  Unfortunately,
make and sh interact badly on these conditions.  The problem is the
shell flag -e.  This is supposed to cause non-interactive shells to
exit on the first bad command.  Make uses this flag (it calls the shell
with -ce unless we are ignoring errors).  Now, when the shell executes
the command line, if the command on the if statement returns FALSE, the
shell will exit immediately WITHOUT taking the ELSE branch.  You can
work around this problem by preceding the make file lines containing
the offending if statements with a -, but that is not really
acceptable.  My question is:  is this a bug in sh or a bug in make?  If
it is a bug in make, then should I fix it by just never using the -e
flag or should I try something else?  If it is a bug in sh, I don't
think there is enough context available to really properly handle this
case.

If you still don't follow the problem, try the following:

	sh -ce "if false; then echo 'true'; else echo 'false'; fi"

then try it without the -e flag.  Compare the results.  What SHOULD the
results be?

I think the problem is in the shell, but I'm not sure how to really fix
it.  I could either turn off the -e flag while executing the command
list associated with the if, then turn it back right after.  Or, I
could set a variable saying "we're in an if - ignore errors".  Which
would be better?

/Joe