Re: GNU make or portable make?

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Ralf" == Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

Ralf> If Automake were only started now, I think requiring GNU make
Ralf> would be a prudent design decision.

Yeah.  Portability looked a lot more important back then.  Nowadays I
think assuming GNU make is completely reasonable.  You can probably even
dig up cases where the configury for a project is bigger than GNU make
itself... you could shrink some programs by shipping the build tool :-)

Ralf> Still, as things stand, I'm not sure whether changing design goals of
Ralf> Automake now are such a good idea.  BSD developers really like using
Ralf> their own make.  The code we have works, build system overhead is really
Ralf> bad only on w32.  We have opportunities for improvement by assuming
Ralf> Posix and XSI shell in more places, guarded by suitable tests.  As long
Ralf> as the build system parallelizes well, I don't think there is too much
Ralf> cause for concern.

The "make" part of the build parallelizes well, but the configure part
does not.  I think that is the big problem today.  It is particularly
noticeable in big trees like gcc or gdb.

GNU make could help solve this.  See quagmire for a random stab at this
idea.  It isn't the most pleasant programming environment, but then
neither is the m4+shell combination ;-).  I'm sure there are other
workable approaches as well.

Tom