On 2010.8.15 4:59 AM, Daniel Pfeiffer wrote:
>> So there is a chicken/egg problem. At the point Makefile.PL is run it cannot
>> know what make you are going to use to run the generated Makefile. It has to
>> make a guess, and $Config{make} is all it has to go on. This is mostly
>> important to Windows users where dmake and nmake have very different and
>> incompatible syntaxes for fundamental things, like escape sequences.
>
> $Config{make} is what some far away distributor chose to build perl. It
> doesn't say anything about my machine...
There's nothing else to go on. :-/
You could grovel through PATH for things that look like make, but what happens
when you find more than one? (I have at least two on my OS X machine). And
then there's things like the Solaris UCB bizarreness where they basically have
two parallel tool chains (usually Sun's and GNU's).
Reason #23098 why MakeMaker turns out to be a bad idea.
>> If you're running with something other than $Config{make} you really should
>> let MakeMaker know by passing in MAKE. It *probably* doesn't matter for
>> anything but Windows, but I've seen makes do some stupid things.
>>
>> As for MakeMaker not setting MAKE at all, its not guaranteed that a given
>> make
>> variant will set MAKE. Setting MAKE was put in specifically for MMS (a
>> popular commercial VMS make variant) but I didn't check other variants. See
>> commit 04be35b73f4eb51d651980e0185b14ff0a87b847 back in 2004.
>>
>> It may be possible to make that smarter, only set it if necessary, but you'd
>> need a way to detect that. If you can do some research to show that most
>> makes set MAKE then it can be made VMS-only code.
>
> Well, ifndef is a gmake speciality. And POSIX doesn't mention MAKE.
Can't use ifndef, its incompatible with other makes and we don't know what
make we're generating the file for. Chicken/egg.
> How about configure style testing, unless your variable already points
> you to a make that you know needs the setting:
>
> .PHONY: all
> all:
> echo $(MAKE) > result-file
Which make binary do you run that with? Chicken/egg.
>> In the end, does "perl Makefile.PL MAKE=makepp" work?
>
> Like I said, no. $(MAKE) contains some magic, which the user should not
> have to worry about. Actually there are two differents kinds of magic,
> one to bring the whole processing back into one instance of makepp, and,
> where it's so screwed that that doesn't work, a different magic falls
> back to real recursive processes, but still with makepp.
Is this magic different from gmake's MAKE magic? If so, you're likely to run
into issues beyond MakeMaker.
MakeMaker can *probably* get away with only setting MAKE on VMS, but it would
need to be tested. If you do the cross platform testing (dmake, nmake, gmake,
BSD make) I'll patch it in.
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