Re: RFE: Generating a stub Makefile

[Mark Heily]

On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 01:06 -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Mark Heily wrote:
> > This seems I would like Autoconf to generate a stub Makefile to  
> > include in the top-level of each tarball. The purpose of this stub  
> > Makefile is to call ./configure
> > to generate the real Makefile and then re-invoke make(1) using the  
> > real Makefile.
> 
> I also like the ability to simply check out a pristine copy of the
> source and then simply type 'make'.  Fortunately this is quite easy.
> I have always been fond of Jim's GNUmakefile in Coreutils.
> 

Thanks for providing the GNUmakefile info. It seems the consensus on
this list is to avoid making this kind of improvement to Autoconf. Too
bad.
 
The stub Makefile would be an additional convenience,
and would not prevent you from running './configure' manually
and adding whatever flags you want. 

I develop several projects that use Autoconf/Automake
and am constantly copying the source tarballs around to various machines
to test the build process.

It occurred to me that the process of configuring the package and
building the package could be consolidated into a single command,
so instead of typing:

        ./configure && make

you could just type:

        make

... by creating a very simple and small stub Makefile as I described
earlier. 

It would be even better to add autoreconf support as you described, so
that when I check out a copy of a program from CVS or Subversion, I can
run 'make' instead of running

        autoreconf -f -i && ./configure && make

This way, you only run autoreconf or the configure script when it is
necessary to configure the build in a special way. The rest of the time,
it is completely automatic.


"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
   -- Albert Einstein