On 11/22/2011 6:02 PM, Harlan Stenn wrote:
The BSDs have their good reasons to want to avoid GPL'd code, especially
GPL3.
Adoption of GNU make as the default in BSD isn't the only possible way
forward.
BSD make could implement the features the autotools need. From a bit of
quick manual reading, it looks like some of that work is already done.
BSD make understands := assignments and .PHONY, for example.
Besides: cd /usr/ports/devel/gmake && make install
Chances are good you don't need even that. If you've ever installed a
package via ports, you probably have GNU make installed already, as a
build dependency.
Google just found this for me in the NetBSD docs: "Packages which use
GNU Automake will almost certainly require GNU Make." I'm guessing that
was written by a NetBSD fan from experience, rather than slipped in by
some pro-GNU-anti-BSD saboteur. If so, fait accompli already.
Besides, why should BSD purity get to hold back the Autotools? If the
distrowatch.com stats are to be believed, *BSD's market share is under
1% that of Linux, which itself is only about 1% of the overall market of
machines the Autotools can reasonably be used on. Further reduce that
by the percentage of BSD boxes that have not yet had gmake installed
after installation; 10% maybe? We're probably talking about a set of
boxes comprising < 0.001% of the market. (10% of 1% of 1%.)
The hyperconservative autotools do drop backwards compatibility for
marginalized systems occasionally. I seem to recall that some Ultrix
compatibility hacks were dropped recently, for example.
Not that I'm comparing modern BSDs to Ultrix. They BSDs probably
couldn't be killed off at this point even if one wanted to. Still, to
cater to the limitations of systems commanding something on the order
0.001% of the market seems a *bit* obsessive.
