On Mar 2, 2000, Jim Meyering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Alexandre Oliva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> | On Mar 1, 2000, Jim Meyering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> |
> | > Don't use `ln' (which was just a space optimization anyway)
> |
> | A worthwhile optimization, IMO.
> Worthwhile? Why?
Because then `make dist' is much faster. I often find myself running
`make dist' multiple times on packages I don't manage alone, to
compare it with the source tree and see if somebody forgot to add some
file to the dist rules. I really appreciate that `make dist' is fast
in this case. But then, I often configure on another filesystem, so
the `ln' optimization doesn't apply that often.
But I remember a posting, some time ago, from someone who was really
glad about being able to fix errors in the dist tree and having them
automagically fixed in the source tree too. Of course, there may be
arguments against that too. I don't have a strong opinion, anyway,
and, from an automake maintenance point of view, it really seems best
to disable the optimization.
> That'd be ok if there were a compelling reason to continue using such
> hacks, but in any case, please don't advocate use of -exec in cases
> like this. Using xargs is more efficient:
But xargs is not as portable: it's not available on all platforms, it
may fail if there are too many too long pathnames, and it may find
trouble with filenames containing blanks (but, admittedly, so would
make and automake), so I just played on the safe side.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Enjoy Guaraná
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company aoliva@{redhat, cygnus}.com
Free Software Developer and Evangelist CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp
oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} Write to mailing lists, not to me
