>>>>> "Nathanael" == Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Nathanael> Automake is quite good at generating dependencies for Nathanael> things which behave 'normally': C files compiled to O files Nathanael> with the same name, & so on. In fact it appears to do so Nathanael> via ordinary suffix rules. It appears to, but in fact it doesn't, and can't. I wish it could! Anyway, problems in this area are why you see requirements that automake know certain things statically, all the EXTRA_ stuff, etc. Nathanael> What it does do is to demand extra work for the maintainer Nathanael> in order to tell Automake that theses *are* unusual cases. Nathanael> This isn't positive for dependency handling. I think it would help my understanding if you gave a concrete example. My perspective is that usually automake doesn't make things any worse, since you can always write your own rules and add stuff, just like with make. Nathanael> I don't think it's wise to tell developers that a program Nathanael> will 'take care' of their dependencies, and unfortunately Nathanael> that's the message being sent out by automake. By what mechanism is this message sent? Perhaps there is text in the manual we could change? These are quasi-rhetorical questions, since I don't think we actually send that message at all. But, of course, there is always some distance between what one writes (or projects) and what one thinks one writes (or projects); we can address this if it refers to something concrete. Nathanael> The message sent by automake, sadly, is "Make is a bad Nathanael> tool. Make is hard to use." I've probably said that, though I don't have a reference. It doesn't really capture my current understanding though. `make' is an adequate tool for its purpose. Unfortunately its limitations show through; the world has changed from underneath it. Nathanael> Which *would* be fine, except that automake documentation Nathanael> tells you that you don't need to write it by hand, libtool Nathanael> documentation is less than would be desirable on using Nathanael> libtool without automake (the information's actually mostly Nathanael> there, in fact, but its use is actively discouraged), and Nathanael> automake-generated Makefiles are often nearly Nathanael> undecipherable. These days we document LINK and COMPILE. Perhaps the docs need to be expanded. Tom
