On 11/22/2011 9:18 AM, Nick Bowler wrote:
....users who
have no idea that there's a difference between GNU make and the version
of "make" that is already on their system.
That's not the user's job today, and there's no reason it would have to
be in this new world, either. Autoconf's raison d'etre is detection of
platform differences. In most cases, it tries to provide workarounds,
but if it detects that you do not have some unavoidable dependency, it
will give a sensible error and stop.
But when a user building a free software package for the first time in
their life runs "./configure&& make", and receives a spew of cryptic
messages about syntax errors or worse, I suspect that their first
reaction is not going to be "Whoops! I should have run gmake instead."
Again, autoconf is in a position to work around this.
One way would be for it to write out a GNUmakefile containing the actual
build instructions and a Makefile, the latter which would be used only
when GNU make wasn't used. It could then "gmake $@" for you.
