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Re: bsd building


From: John Darrington
Subject: Re: bsd building
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 06:59:13 +0800
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 10:03:36AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     Jason Stover <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > Building on OpenBSD is still a bit of a pain. The
     > default make is not GNU make, so I had to install GNU
     > make because the BSD make does not like $< somewhere
     > in the makefile, 
     
     I think we should fix this problem.  

Not understanding Automatic variables is a severe limitation for a makefile.
Perhaps we could work around it for now, but I'm sure it'd come back and bite
us in the future.  (for example if we built using a virtual transparent 
filesystem).

     
     > and I had to export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib so
     > ./confifure would find gsl's shared libraries.  And on BSD,
     > /usr/local/include is not automatically in my include path.
     >
     > This happens even with gnulib.
     
     I actually think that this one is not our problem.  I think that
     it is reasonable to expect that libraries are either installed
     where we can find them by default or the user is able to point us
     to them.

I agree with Ben's comments here.
     
     Our Makefiles should be portable, because it is not difficult to
     make them portable, and Automake does most of the work for us.
     But libraries are more system dependent; they're not standardized
     as well as POSIX make.

Several years ago, I gave up trying to create portable makefiles, except very 
trivial ones.  There's so many caveats.
     
     > I guess I'm asking for some general guidlines, if there are any.
     
     I don't know of a good general rule.  Please, if you find some
     useful guidelines, please pass them along.

From the GNU Maintainers Document ( 
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Platforms.html#Platforms ):

        Supporting other platforms is optional --- we do it when that seems 
        like a good idea, but we don't consider it obligatory. If the users 
        don't take care of a certain platform, you may have to desupport it 
        unless and until users come forward to help. Conversely, if a user 
        offers changes to support an additional platform, you will probably 
        want to install them, but you don't have to. If you feel the changes 
        are complex and ugly, if you think that they will increase the burden 
        of future maintenance, you can and should reject them.

So I guess it's a decision for Jason, since he's the only active person on 
this list who has access to BSD.  --- Jason, are you willing to take 
responsibility for future BSD maintenance?


PS.     Some years ago I wrote a autoconf macro to test if a implementation of 
        MAKE was GNU or something else.  The autoconf maintainer declined to 
        include it on the grounds of limited usefulness, but I think it's 
        packaged somewhere in a compendium of 3rd party macros.  Try googling
        if you think it'll be useful.

J'

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