Re: CHECK_STRUCTS/dmpstruct.h mechanism is broken.

[Paul Eggert]

On 4/15/19 11:11 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> I think that packages that needs GNU Make should have a simple
> makefile for any old Make, which invokes GNU Make.  That is so that
> (./configure; make install) will work provided GNU Make is available
> under some conventional name, even if it isn't called 'make'.
>
> Since Emacs already "assumes GNU Make", I wonder whether it does that.

It does that in a different way. 'configure' searches for GNU Make and
if it's not called 'make', 'configure' tells the user GNU Make's name as
the very last thing it outputs in a message like "Now you can run
'gmake'." In practice this seems to have been good enough. I recall
trying to do something fancier, along the lines you suggested, but
having some portability issues and settling for the current approach.


> I see that Emacs comes with a file GNUmakefile
> and configuring creates Makefile.  What is the job
> of each of these files, and how do they relate to each other?

The following comment in GNUmakefile is intended to explain that. If
it's unclear please let me know.

# This GNUmakefile is for GNU Make.  It is for convenience, so that
# one can run 'make' in an unconfigured source tree.  In such a tree,
# this file causes GNU Make to first create a standard configuration
# with the default options, and then reinvokes itself on the
# newly-built Makefile.  If the source tree is already configured,
# this file defers to the existing Makefile.

# If you want non-default build options, or if you want to build in an
# out-of-source tree, you should run 'configure' before running 'make'.
# But run 'autogen.sh' first, if the source was checked out directly
# from the repository.