I would actually tend to agree here--the more stuff we stick in  
environment variables (especially flags as part of commands) the more  
opaque the makefiles become. If I see rm -f, I know (with high  
confidence) exactly what it's doing. If I see $(RM), I have to guess,  
and wonder what's different than just rm.

Variables should be used for stuff that is prone to changing on  
various different platforms.

- Robert

On Oct 20, 2009, at 3:04 AM, David Kirkby wrote:

> Only a few days ago you agreed we would not have RM, CP and other very
> basic commands set as environment variables.
>
> IMHO, if someone wants 'rm -f' they should type it. Looking in the
> packages now, 95+% of people use 'rm' or 'rm -f' rather than '$(RM)"
> so I think it would be better to drop the use of such an environment
> variable.
>
> Dave
>
> 2009/10/20 William Stein <[email protected]>:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Tim Dumol <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> The same problem happened with GLPK's spkg, to note.
>>
>> I'm personally OK with the change you suggest.  Post a patch (to the
>> repo in local/bin/) and I'll referee it.
>>
>> William
>>
>>>
>>> On Oct 20, 5:26 am, Tim Dumol <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Hey,
>>>>
>>>> I am currently trying to build a `jpeg-7` spkg on Arch Linux  
>>>> x86_64,
>>>> but I've had problems with $RM
>>>>
>>>> {{{
>>>> ...
>>>> checking if gcc -std=gnu99 supports -c -o file.o... rm: cannot  
>>>> remove
>>>> `conftest*': No such file or directory
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> }}}
>>>>
>>>> etc.
>>>>
>>>> Full log here:http://sage.pastebin.com/m94e6767
>>>>
>>>> Doing:
>>>>
>>>> {{{
>>>> RM="rm -f" && export RM
>>>>
>>>> }}}
>>>>
>>>> fixed the problem for me.
>>>>
>>>> $SAGE_LOCAL$/bin/sage-env sets $RM to "rm" (L245), but jpeg-7's
>>>> configure sets $RM to "rm -f" (L7075), if $RM is not yet set. It  
>>>> also
>>>> sets $CP and $MV to "cp -f" and "mv -f", respectively.
>>>>
>>>> I wonder if `sage-env `should also set $RM to "rm -f". Thoughts?
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> William Stein
>> Associate Professor of Mathematics
>> University of Washington
>> http://wstein.org
>>
>>>
>>
>
> >


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to 
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URL: http://www.sagemath.org
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to