Hi Nick, Nick Bowler <[email protected]> writes:
> On Wed, Jun 03, 2026 at 03:06:29PM +0900, Maxim Cournoyer wrote: >> I see. It'd be nice to have an Automake switch to tell it to >> unapologetically target GNU Make ;-). We already have GNU Make >> constructs used in the Makefile.am file of the Guix project, and since >> it can only run on GNU/Linux (or Hurd) systems, it doesn't seem a >> problem to me that it depends on GNU Make for its build system. > > This comes up from time to time, but I don't understand why people try > to use a portability tool like Automake to write non-portable makefiles... I seem to recall Autotools (aka the GNU Build System) being recommended as the build system for GNU packages, but can't find such guidance in either (info (standards)) or (info (maintain)). I at least remember some friction caused by the move of GNU Jami from Autotools to CMake, for example. It's also a bit surprising (to me) that something called the GNU Build System does not make it easy to leverage the GNU-specific improvements like that of GNU Make; it seems like a missed opportunity to make the tool more flexible and encourage the use of other GNU components. One way it could perhaps work would be to have flag for it, that could be passed when using a AC_GNU_MAKE macro or something on the Autoconf side, which would check for GNU Make availability at configure time and cause Automake to accept/use GNU Make constructs. > That being said, if you really want to incorporate GNU make constructs > into your makefiles, you can avoid all problems of the form "Automake > does not pass through my GNU-specific make syntax unmodified" by just > putting these into GNUmakefile, and then use an include directive to > pull in the rest of the rules from the (Automake-generated) regular > Makefile. That's a neat trick, thank you. -- Thanks, Maxim
