On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Peter O'Gorman wrote:
On 01/12/2011 12:01 PM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
[About the purpose or "spirit" of Automake]
Automake is about much more than just portability to different make
implementations; it's about:
No. The philosophy of the autotools has always been to make the end users
life easier, in part by not requiring any external tools, if automake were to
require the user install GNU make it would be a break with that philosophy. I
don't think that's a good idea.
While GNU make is a really good 'make' program, I think that 'make' in
general is a flawed concept. If there was going to be a revolutionary
change, then I would like to see a small embedded build engine be
included which accomplishes the few functionalities needed from make,
but also avoids needing additional programs. A little bit of analysis
will reveal that Automake really does not require much functionality
from 'make'. Probably 5% of what GNU 'make' is capable of. I don't
like it that 'make' depends on file timestamps, and that it is unable
to cache what was used to create the current binary, and that
dependency information from the build system needs to be cached in
'make' include files.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
