On Tue, 17 Aug 2010, Tom Tromey wrote:
"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 :-)
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
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
