Re: GNU make or portable make?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010, Tom Tromey wrote:

> > > > > > "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 :-)

If there is thinking to require GNU make, then there should be a bit 
more thinking as well.  A specialized mini-shell intended to run 
configure scripts and perform substitutions would be quite useful.  It 
would eliminate the shell portability issue and eliminate the need to 
fork to perform functionality like 'sed'.  The current approach 
requires that each package provide full configure/build capability 
using only portable aspects of tools and with no special build 
software (e.g. m4 macros) already installed on the system.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/