>>>>> "Ralf" == Ralf Wildenhues <ralf.wildenh...@gmx.de> 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
