Re: Documentation generation patch [Take 2]

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

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.

But these files, and info files, need to go in the source tarballs so that 
release users don't need these tools!  This is simply a matter of the GNU 
Coding Standards:

   GNU distributions usually contain some files which are not source
   files--for example, Info files, and the output from Autoconf,
   Automake, Bison or Flex. Since these files normally appear in the  
   source directory, they should always appear in the source directory,
   not in the build directory. So Makefile rules to update them should
   put the updated files in the source directory.

and

   Naturally, all the source files must be in the distribution. It is   
   okay to include non-source files in the distribution, provided they
   are up-to-date and machine-independent, so that building the
   distribution normally will never modify them. We commonly include
   non-source files produced by Bison, lex, TeX, and makeinfo; this helps
   avoid unnecessary dependencies between our distributions, so that
   users can install whichever packages they want to install.

So, unless we want to say that users must have makeinfo installed if they
want the documentation to be installed (and that would be a regression
from 2.95, since 2.95 included makeinfo), or that they must have Bison
installed (again a regression, since the Bison files for the 2.95 branch
are in CVS), these files should be generated in the source directory.

> 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.  

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

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk