Re: [PATCH 4/4] Use AM_MISSING_PROG when making bison the default YACC here

[Daniel Richard G.]

On Wed, 2010 Apr 28 02:05+0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
>
> If you can build a package with non-GNU make in builddir = srcdir, and
> with GNU make in builddir != srcdir, that's all we promise.

Considering all the trouble Automake goes to to accommodate less-capable
make(1) programs, that's a bit disappointing. If a maintainer concedes
that the user has to install a non-native tool in order to build his/her
source package, that tool could just as well be something like CMake.

I've always understood the GNU approach to be "work with what you have,
even if it's horribly, horribly broken." The fact that Autoconf decided
to use M4 rather than rely on something as basic as *shell functions*
drove the point home for me.

> If, in order to so support building with non-GNU make in builddir !=
> srcdir, you can propose a small change to the Makefile.am, that will
> be fine with us. But making the builds less reliable, like Andreas
> proposed by use of the 'missing' program, is IMO not adequate.

I would suggest unconditionally qualifying the generated source
filenames with $(srcdir). You lose the ability to regenerate them when
srcdir is read-only, but I'd rather give up that than out-of-source-
tree builds when GNU Make isn't available.


--Daniel


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