Maintainers -- now what? (was RE: rfc: new libgcc build mechanism)

[Donn Terry <donnte at microsoft dot com>]

This seems to have wound down.

At this point we have the following situation:
The current makefile/configure combination doesn't
work on systems without symbolic links because of
the nested quoting problem discussed in this thread.

No one has yet come up with a "decent" solution to
the problem (when all the constraints are considered)
that doesn't involve $().  (We can discuss whether
$() is "decent" separately, but that's an issue of
availablity, not understandability.)

I'd submit a patch (a) if FSF could accept it (and
I'm short a signature yet on that, but working on it)
and (b) if I knew what would be accepted.  In the
meantime, since $() works for me, I'm keeping a private
patch that solves the problem (although it's not what
I'd do if $() were the permanent solution, what I have
is more "rot proof", but not clean).

However, that leaves other systems without symlinks out
in the cold.  Do the maintainers want to pick one of the
ugly solutions and declare it "the best we can do", or ???
(If they were to pick one, the variant that uses a
generated script to generate a piece of a makefile that's
included using multiple -f options seems the least onerous
to me.)

Donn

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Felix Lee [mailto:flee@teleport.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2000 6:23 PM
> To: Donn Terry
> Cc: 'autoconf@gnu.org '; 'gcc@gcc.gnu.org '
> Subject: Re: rfc: new libgcc build mechanism
> 
> 
> Donn Terry <donnte@microsoft.com>:
> > SUBDIR_FLAGS_TO_PASS = $(ORDINARY_FLAGS_TO_PASS) \
> >         "CC=$$(echo @cc_set_by_configure@ |
> > $(PREPEND_DOTDOT_TO_RELATIVE_PATHS) )"
> 
> oh, I see.  you didn't mention @cc_set_by_configure@ in your
> original example.  ok.  hmm...
> 
> this is ugly, but seems to work, and I don't recommend it.
> but at the moment I can't think of another solution without
> major restructuring.
> 
> 	cc_0=`echo "$(CC)" | sed -e 's/^/cc0:/'`
> 	# or this:
> 	#cc_0=testing
> 
> 	PREPEND=sed -e 's/^/pre:/'
> 	FLAGS=	"cc_1=$(cc_0)"				\
> 		"CC=\`echo \$$(cc_1) | $(PREPEND)\`"
> 	first:
> 		make $(FLAGS) next
> 	next:
> 		echo "$(CC)"
> --
>