Re: Require GNU Make Somehow?

[Jim Meyering <meyering at ascend dot com>]

Craig Burley <burley@gnu.org> writes:
| >I'm confused about a g77 configure.in as I thought there was policy
| >against one, but there used to be a test in config-lang.in for srcdir
| >!= builddir.  That just warned about the need for GNU make at
| >configure time.  I'll look into sorting something out for g77's
| >makefile, but it presumably won't kick in until g77 starts building.
|
| Oops, I meant config-lang.in, not configure.in, you're right.  Yes,
| the test and message have gone away; I don't mind resurrecting
| them, but feel that's really the job of the top-level makefile
| to do, in this case, gcc's and egcs's, and thinking down that
| avenue led to my original email on this topic.
|
| >Indeed.  If I want GNU make, I'd be (should be) typing `gmake' on a
| >non-GNU system and a test is needed at compile time, not configure
| >time.
|
| Right, though it might be most straightforward and reliable to
| have configure time lay a sort of "trap" that is either avoided
| by using GNU make at compile time, or triggered by not using
| GNU make then, and the effect of the trap is to print a nice
| message and exit.

This isn't quite the same, since GNU make isn't required to
build the fileutils, but it might be useful...

GNUmakefile

For more context, see the latest fileutils test release:
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fileutils-3.16n.tar.gz, although the above
might be a slight improvement over what's in that tarball.