Re: Documentation chapter: The GNU build system

[Steven G. Johnson]

On 24 Apr 2001, Akim Demaille wrote:
> Steven> See my previous email for a rephrasing.  I think it's
> Steven> important to point out that some versions of Automake (maybe
> Steven> in the future, too) 
> 
> But then you miss an important requirement: Perl.

I didn't think of Perl because that is an explicit requirement of
Automake, and produces only the Makefile.in.  It is not invoked when you
just do a 'make'.  What seems to confuse people is that the Makefile.in
that the developer works with is itself not portable; they don't realize
that a different one will be generated by 'make dist'.

How about:

Some versions of Automake may require that additional tools be present
on the @emph{developer's} machine.  In particular, the
@code{Makefile.in} that the developer works with may not be portable
(e.g. it might use special features of your compiler to automatically
generate dependency information).  Running @code{make dist}, however,
produces a @file{hello-1.0.tar.gz} package (or whatever the
program/version is) with a @code{Makefile.in} that will work on any
system.

Steven