Re: OpenBSD 2.7

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello, Lars!

> > Bad news: the native make doesn't work - it cannot create "autoconf" and
> > other scripts because they have both explicit and suffix rules:
> [...]
> 
>  BSD makes in their current form suck outright. Many of them don't even
>  pass variables down to sub-makes. This is the main raison d'etre for
>  gmake on my OBSD and NBSD systems ...

Ok, they may suck, but Automake manages somehow to be compatible with
them. It's the code from Autoconf's Makefile.am that breaks BSD make.

Now we have this in the top-level Makefile.am:

# Follow the version number changes.
$(bin_SCRIPTS): configure.in

When BSD make scans for rules to make autoconf it picks the explicit rule
first, but it's empty. I believe that there is no way to use the suffix
rule in BSD make if an explicit rule is present.

This can be very frustrating for BSD users because make doesn't repost any
error, but "autoconf" and other scripts are not created.

Possible soultions:

1) Remove the explicit rule. Whenever configure.in changes "make clean"
will need to be run. It can only be a problem for Autoconf developers who
don't clean the working directory on updates (i.e. not for me). And it's a
very minor problem after all.

2) Use AM_MAINTANER_MODE. Seems to be an overkill.

3) Write explicit rules for every script and include configure.in in the
dependencies.

4) Include the dependency on configure.in in the suffix rule. I'm afraid
it's impossible.

Better ideas?

Regards,
Pavel Roskin