Mark H Weaver <m...@netris.org> writes:
> Hmm, good question. I'm not sure, not because 2002 is too recent, but > rather because I'm not sure that GNU Make should be a requirement for > building Guile. > > Guile's README does not list GNU Make in the section of "Required > External Packages". This, along with the fact that we use Automake > which is clearly designed to produce portable Makefiles, makes me > inclined to think that if Guile depends on non-standard extensions in > GNU Make, that this is a bug. Agreed that requiring GNU Make is a bug. > On the other hand, if this is a bug, it seems that we've had this bug > for several years at least, and that non-GNU systems are already working > around it by adding GNU Make as a requirement. For example, the Guile 2 > packages in the OpenBSD and FreeBSD ports collections already list GNU > Make as a prerequisite for building Guile 2. Our README also has > "Special Instructions For Some Systems" which mentions that gmake is > required on FreeBSD 11.0. However, there's no mention of any other > non-GNU systems requiring GNU Make to build Guile. NetBSD's pkgsrc (which is portable to about 20 systems) also is marked to need GNU make. Practically, it's not a problem, because packaging systems have to deal with many programs that require GNU make anway. > So, we now have a choice. We can fully embrace a requirement on GNU > Make, or we can treat it as a bug to be fixed. > > I'm still inclined to consider it a bug, but maybe we can have the best > of both worlds here. I see that Automake has conditionals: I am also inclined to see it as a bug. Generally, most times GNU make is needed are because someone used an extension without realizing that there is make other than GNU make, vs it making a huge difference. But if it is hard to do things differently, that's somewhat tilting at windwills. But hey, that's what running scheme is all about!
