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Re: Documenting tools necessary for GCC [draft]


On May 31, 2003, Neil Booth <neil@daikokuya.co.uk> wrote:

> Kaveh is documenting what was agreed at the summit - we specify GNU
> make only, and from now on we feel free to use all its extensions so as
> to simplify our Makefile maintenance.  Yeah!

FWIW, what was agreed at the summit was that we were going to propose
this change to the other maintainers of the configury, namely, DJ
Delorie and Nathanael Nerode (not officially a maintainer (yet?), but
a very interested party :-).

Also, nobody has pointed out any reason for us to actually require to
GNU make, other than being able to point users at a version of make
that is known to work.  There were discussions about using GNU
make-specific features, but nobody could give me a good example of
what exact feature they had in mind.

I heard claims that one of the reasons to switch to GNU make was that
people weren't sure what was ok to add to a makefile and what wasn't.
IMO, requiring GNU make for this reason is a red herring.  You can use
non-portable shell constructs in GNUmakefiles just the same, and using
GNU make won't help in this regard.  Besides, checking for
non-portable configury features is exactly one of the reasons why we
have configury maintainers that know about these rules.  My opinion is
that, if you're unsure whether a feature is portable, either avoid
using it or ask one of the maintainers.  IMO, letting GNU make
features sneak in will eventually get us to a terribly complex build
machinery, like that of glibc.  I can't say that I'm looking forward
to maintaining something like that :-)

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer


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