On Tuesday 22 November 2011, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > >> That said, apart from the fact that each generation of automake > >> maintainers at one point in his automake-carriere comes up with "switch > >> to gmake", > This to me is the real point. I feel history repeats. > I guess that's the sad fate of humanity ;-) > >> my feel is automake must not use gmake because (in theory) > >> there should not be any to use gmake. > >> > > I don't understand what you're trying to convey here, sorry. > Sorry, fedora's broken thunderbird had corrupted my sentence: > > Let me try to rephrase it: > > If automake so far has been able to achieve its job, by not using gmake > proprietary constructs in its Makefile.ins, then there should not be any > need for automake to _now_ start using gmake-constructs in Makefile.ins. > > Or simpler: So far, automake has not been using gmake, so why should it > now start doing so? > Because IMHO the cost/benefit ratio of using portable make only has become higher and higer -- not because the cost of writing portable Makefiles has increased, rather because the the benefits of doing so have stadily decreased over time, thanks to the "rise" of GNU/Linux and, considerably less, of Cygwin (rise which has had as a consequence that fact that their versions of the standard tools have become more widespread and easily available).
> >>> Another question is if GNU make is really good enough to warrant this > >>> sort of change. > >> Good point - gmake has a long history of "hickups" :-) > >> > > Care to elaborate on this? > Difficult to answer for me, because I am using automake with gmake (i.e. > my works rely upon the subset of make-constructs automake uses) and do > not exploit gmake. But I recall there had been massively broken gmake > releases and releases with major functional changes, which had broken a lot. > This sounds scary. Still, I'd like to see for such a serious statement more solid proof and references than hearsay and vague memories. As an aside, you (involountarily?) raised an ortoghonal, interesting point: the fact that many projects uses automake-generated Makefiles, which relies only on a tiny subset of the GNU make features, implies that the more advanced and thus potentially tricky of those features are much less tested "real-wordly-wise" than they could be. Having Automake-generated Makefiles require GNU make could probably help, in the long run, to improve the quality of GNU make itself. Regards, Stefano
