Re: Documentation generation patch [Take 2]

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

>>>>> "Joseph" == Joseph S Myers <jsm28@cam.ac.uk> writes:

    Joseph> On Fri, 11 May 2001, Mark Mitchell wrote:

    >> Ack, no.  Nothing should be generated in the source directory.
    >> The fact that bison-generated files go there, for example, is,
    >> in my opinion, a bug.

    Joseph> But these files, and info files, need to go in the source
    Joseph> tarballs so that release users don't need these tools!

No need to exclaim about that -- the release-generation scripts should
do this.  

There's no reason the ordinary Makefiles should do it.  We should have
a "maintainer mode" in which the files are generated in the objdir,
and a default mode where the versions in the source directory are used
unconditionally, and regardless of whether or not they look out of
date.  (That last bit so that vagaries of tar don't screw up builds.)

    >> Non-GNU make is (empirically) not supported.  We've argued
    >> about this, and it looks like I won, sort-of by accident.
    >> There are now constructs that only work with GNU make.

    Joseph> So, GNU make features can be freely used where they
    Joseph> simplify or clarify the Makefiles?  (Though hopefully not
    Joseph> to the extent of complexity and obscurity of the glibc
    Joseph> Makefiles.)

*I* would be in favor of that, but actively moving in this direction
requires SC approval.  The BSD people are Not Happy whenever this
comes up.

And we should be considering automake, as it is the approved GNU way
of doing things.

I used to think that automake wasn't flexible enough.  Now I think
that if you can't express your build system cleanly with automake,
your build system is too complex, and you need to think harder.

--
Mark Mitchell                   mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC               http://www.codesourcery.com