On 25/02/18 01:18, Wietse Venema wrote: > John Fawcett: >> .... >> I was wondering if it might be wise to make m4 a mandatory prerequisite, >> without which compilation would fail.? > We could add this at the top of the script: > > m4 </dev/null || exit 1 > > but that would be a point solution. For a dependency list someone > would have to write a tool that scrapes the scripts and enumerates > all their dependencies, and that can be (re)run with each release. > I am not inclined to curate the dependency list by hand.
That would also be useful to assist in documenting dependencies. > > I find it sad that systems have make but not m4. That tool has been > around as part of the UNIX toolkit for over 30 years, on all the > systems that I have played with. > > Wietse I normally start out with the minimal set of packages and only add software that I need to those. While make was already there, the compiler and m4 were missing. I installed the compiler but forgot m4, so it was my fault really. John
