It's always nice when you find some obscure feature that happens to be the only way around a thorny problem.

Today that was the "::=str" feature in #bmake, for which the manual page even states "This modifier and its variations are useful in obscure situations such as...".

I needed to lazily evaluate the output of a command, but also have that output shared across other shell instances for the same target. Without ::=str I don't think there was any other way around the problem.

#pkgsrc