PATCH: top level makefile cleanup (prep for autoconfiscation)

[Nathanael Nerode]

On 28 Jan 2002, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

> On Jan 27, 2002, Nathanael Nerode <neroden@doctormoo.dyndns.org> wrote:
> I could have sworn that a number of project, such as make, flex and
> bison, were indeed in src, even if they were not the master CVS
> repositories for these projects.
> 
> I'd rather still keep support for make, bison, byacc, etc in the
> top-level Makefile.  It's quite nice to able to drop their source
> trees into GCC and have a complete development environment spring out
> of a single build.  You may think this is a Red Hat-only thing, but it
> is not.  Long before I joined Red Hat, I already enjoyed the ability
> to do one-shot bootstrapping of a complete GNU development environment
> on a number of proprietary operating systems.
That is definitely cute.

> IMO, it would be a shame to let the knowledge about the optimal
> dependence list be taken from newcomers.  I can surely re-introduce
> (or keep) those dependencies myself, and still enjoy this, but then it
> won't benefiting those who didn't even think it was possible.  I'd
> like these rules to help others just like they helped me.
* sigh *
The dependencies are all right, but they're far from optimal.  There's a
fair amount of missing dependency information in the Makefile, as well as
some which I know to be bogus.  As for the configure.in file, it doesn't
have proper dependencies, and relies on a sorting order, which is nasty.

> I'm sure you'll see it's easy to keep the rules in place, so please
> think twice before you drop a relevant piece of knowledge on the
> floor.
Hmm.  I wouldn't mind attempting to preserve the Makefile inter-target
dependency rules in some form.  But they are making my job more difficult,
due to sheer clutter.  Also, they'll probably be even less functional
when I take out the corresponding 'configure' information (which makes my
job a *lot* more difficult).  Also, I suspect that many of them are out of
date and would be better reconstructed fresh.

> That said, I won't oppose your move any further, should you really
> conclude that removing these targets has made the task of
> autoconfiscating the top-level directory any easier.  That's a
> laudable goal.  Thanks for taking up this task!

Well, it's kind of fun.  I need more disk space on my machine though; I
can only hold one full gcc-src compilation at a time, which makes
debugging more irritating than it would otherwise be (if I run two, I can
diff the 'stock' and 'changed' versions to figure out where my errors
are).

--Nathanael