Re: Future plans for Autotools

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2021-01-25 at 09:47 -0500, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> I'm not at all familiar with Automake's internals, but the reason I
> suggested taking advantage of GNU make extensions was the potential
> for _complexity_ reduction of the generated Makefile, not
> performance.

Oh yes, there's absolutely no question that generated makefiles could
be made significantly simpler if we didn't have to write them as POSIX-
compliant, and could rely on some GNU make features.  The POSIX spec
for make is pretty limited/limiting.

I only meant to suggest I don't think performance will be much
different.

Your example squarely fits within my thought that if the automake devs
feel that requiring GNU make would make their lives simpler, that would
be a good reason to require it.

> Automake _does_ make heavy use of shell constructs embedded inside
> frequently-executed rules, for instance

Oh interesting.  Yes, I agree, a good bit of shell-based pathname
manipulation could be tossed, if not all, and that could make a
difference.  Especially on platforms like Windows where process startup
is far more expensive.