Re: Small make compatibility changes (take 2)

[Alexandre Julliard]

Vincent Béron  writes:
> This seems to let users build and uninstall with BSD make.
>
> Changelog:
> Evaluate variable after replacement to build with BSD make.

Unfortunately assignments with := are not portable either, so it's
only moving the problem. We probably need to restructure the makefiles
a bit to avoid that construct.

Small make compatibility changes (take 2)

[Vincent Béron]

Le lun 09/08/2004 à 19:05, Alexandre Julliard a écrit :
> Vincent Béron  writes:
> > This seems to let users build and uninstall with BSD make.
> >
> > Changelog:
> > Evaluate variable after replacement to build with BSD make.
>
> Unfortunately assignments with := are not portable either, so it's
> only moving the problem. We probably need to restructure the makefiles
> a bit to avoid that construct.

FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's make, as well as GNU's make, seem to understand
it OK (both from reading the docs and personal experiments).

The current way of doing it doesn't work on FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's
make, although it does work on GNU's make.

Is there some other make which does accept the current way of doing it
and does not accept my proposed way?

Vincent

Small make compatibility changes (take 2)

[Alexandre Julliard]

Vincent Béron  writes:
> The current way of doing it doesn't work on FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's
> make, although it does work on GNU's make.
>
> Is there some other make which does accept the current way of doing it
> and does not accept my proposed way?

There are some makes that don't accept ':=', yes. I don't know whether
they would accept the current way or not, but that doesn't really
matter; since the current way is not portable to BSD we need to change
it anyway. The thing is, we need to replace it with something more
portable, not with something differently non-portable.

Small make compatibility changes (take 2)

[Mike Hearn]

Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> There are some makes that don't accept ':=', yes. I don't know whether
> they would accept the current way or not, but that doesn't really
> matter; since the current way is not portable to BSD we need to change
> it anyway. The thing is, we need to replace it with something more
> portable, not with something differently non-portable.

Devils advocate: seeing as quite a few BSD users (at least the ones I 
know) already have gmake installed, it's free software and easily 
available in ports, why are we putting effort into portability to BSD 
make? Is there ever a situation where a user will have BSD make but be 
unable to use gmake?

<g>

thanks -mike

Small make compatibility changes (take 2)

[Alexandre Julliard]

Mike Hearn  writes:
> Devils advocate: seeing as quite a few BSD users (at least the ones I
> know) already have gmake installed, it's free software and easily
> available in ports, why are we putting effort into portability to BSD
> make? Is there ever a situation where a user will have BSD make but be
> unable to use gmake?

Maybe not, but that's not a reason not to be portable. You can make
the same argument with gcc, of course we could require everybody to
install gcc, but it's better to make the code portable. It's even more
important for makefiles, because if someone wants to port to a new
platform and they can't even start to build they won't get anywhere;
while if it builds except for some compilation errors there's a good
chance they can fix them and submit patches.