Re: (toplevel patch) Real targets for make.

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden at twcny dot rr dot com>]

Paulo wrote:
>
>> [moving the changes to Cygnus configure to binutils and gdb]
>> will happen.  That patch is coming soon; most of the current
>> patches are to prepare for that step.
>
>That's great news.
>
>> Autogen is never run automatically, so this should not be a problem.
>> Only maintainers who edit the toplevel Makefile need to run autogen.
>
>Of course.  But then, editing the toplevel Makefile is much more common 
>than
>editing the gcc fixincludes scripts (the other task that currently 
>requires Autogen).  
My intent is to make it much *less* common than it is now; if I get 
things constructed right, it should be less necessary to edit it when 
I'm done.

>I would not mind (and might give it a try if I knew it would 
>be
>considered good) rewriting Makefile.tpl into Makefile.m4.

So there's still autogen resistance. :-)  I should cc: Bruce Korb, but I 
won't.

I actually quite like autogen, even though I'm not terribly fond of 
LISP, Scheme, or Guile.  I think autogen does a cleaner, better job of 
autogenerating files than any other tool I've used, including m4 
(although m4 is OK).  

Personally, I'd probably start replacing most of the gen* programs with 
autogen-driven scripts if they didn't need to be extremely portable 
(which they do).  It would have the advantage that there would be a 
template file for each generated C file, and the template file would 
mostly look like the generated C file, making for easier editing.

In my semi-long-term plans is a replacement Automake built atop autogen.

So please don't take away my Makefile.tpl. :-)

--Nathanael