Subject: Re: FreeBSD - Building 1.5pre3...
From: jeff (jeff@univrel.pr.uconn.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 02 2001 - 09:40:35 EST
Hauke Fath wrote:
>
> At 22:57 01.03.01 +0100, Jason Quigley wrote:
>
> >Looks like I was a silly boy. I should have been using 'gmake' instead of
> >'make'. Why it didn't register I don't know! The expression "Can't see the
> >wood for the trees" springs to mind.
>
> No. Looks like those who did the transition to autoconf are the silly boys
> - because they built in needless dependencies on GNU make.
>
> The majority of configure scripts out there does _not_ depend on GNU make
> but instead works with a reasonable subset of make commands that is
> supported by a wide variety of make tools out there.
>
> Whoever is responsible for this gratuitous change: Please remove any gmake
> dependencies. Netatalk has long been a cross-platform application that
> could be built without having half a GNU-Linux distribution around. Let's
> keep it that way.
It was a tradeoff. We don't have to worry about maintaining the Makefile
system to pass huge numbers of parameters from one place to another, or
editing Makefiles to add shadow password support, or anything. In
exchange for that, you need a few GNU utilities.
The best cross-platform source code packages I have seen so far use GNU
autoconf (like samba, if I'm not mistaken). The old makefile system also
generated more netatalk-admin questions about its use than almost
anything else in the 1.4b2+asunx.x.x series.
I don't think the transition to GNU autoconf was silly. It was a way to
make things a little bit more cross-platform and easier to maintain.
Tru64 support was added recently with little or no trouble, as an
example of this.
If we need to keep the symbolic links, etc, out of the distribution,
I'll make sure that there aren't any there when I tar it up for
distribution the next time.
jeff
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sun Oct 14 2001 - 03:04:33 EDT