Re: Detecting FreeBSD's make

[Harlan Stenn]

Paul,

Thanks for your response.

> On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 19:46 +0000, Harlan Stenn wrote:
> > I'm getting bitten by the VPATH-handling differences between FreeBSD's
> > make and gmake.
> 
> The automake manual says (somewhere) that the only version of make that
> correctly supports out-of-the-tree builds is GNU make.  The VPATH
> capability in every other version of make that I'm aware of, including
> BSD make and SysV make, is just plain borked (IMNSHO).

IME, that position is excessive.  It was true, as far as I can recall,
for SGI's make, but this is the first time this particular issue has
bitten me (or any of the users of the package) in a *long* time.

> My personal suggestion would be to follow that advice and simply
> document that out-of-the-tree builds are not supported by your project
> unless the user uses GNU make.

That probably won't happen in this case - we'll either figure out the
compatibility issue between bison and byacc or I'll figure out how to
get the 2 files I need into the right build directory.

> It's very difficult for autotools to detect and work around make issues,
> because there's absolutely no guarantee that the "make" program that
> autoconf/etc. finds and uses will be the one the user actually invokes
> to build the project.  Users are not accustomed to saying "./configure
> MAKE=gmake" or similar.

As far as I'm concerned, the version of 'make' that is found by
configure will be the same 'make' that the user invokes.  If that is not
the case and I hear about it I will lart the user.

And I had code in configure.ac to see if 'make' was gmake or not and I
removed that code when ancient SGI (if that's what it was) went away.  I
can always "recover" that old code.

H