Re: Could automake-generated Makefiles required GNU make? (was: Re: [gnu-prog-discuss] portability)

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> > > there may be some benefit to package maintainers (hopefully by
> > > making automake easier to use),
> My hope is to manage, in the *long* run (real long), to turn automake
> (or more precisely, its purpoted GNU-make-based successor, let's call
> it "automire") into something *truly* extensible -- I mean, something
> like autoconf-extensible.  This would be a huge win for the package
> maintainers.

In order for this to work, Automake would need to become self-hosting 
(not need other packages to be installed in advance) and written only 
in a GNU-approved and FSF-copyrighted portable implementation 
language.  Currently Automake is written in perl, which is not a 
GNU-approved or FSF-copyrighted language and is also something which 
would need to be installed in advance.  If Automake was self-hosting 
then there would be no need for distributing pre-generated template 
files since Automake could generate everything it needs at run-time.

It would be quite useful for a FSF project to be spun-up to create an 
embeddable/small language interpreter and standard library which is 
capable of efficiently implementing complex make-like functionality 
('automake') as well as providing functional replacements for any 
necessary string processing currently provided by 'sed', 'awk', and 
'printf'.  The sole function of the interpreter would be to provide 
the framework for building other software.  This intepreter could form 
the basis for the new automake build tool.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/