Re: bsd building

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 10:03:36AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      Jason Stover <address@hidden> writes:
>      
>      > Building on OpenBSD is still a bit of a pain. The
>      > default make is not GNU make, so I had to install GNU
>      > make because the BSD make does not like $< somewhere
>      > in the makefile, 
>      
>      I think we should fix this problem.  
>
> Not understanding Automatic variables is a severe limitation for a makefile.
> Perhaps we could work around it for now, but I'm sure it'd come back and bite
> us in the future.  (for example if we built using a virtual transparent 
> filesystem).

This is a less of a problem than you think.  Some "make" programs
understand automatic variables in implicit rules, but not in
explicit rules.  I used $< in explicit rules without thinking
about it, and this broke OpenBSD's make.

I see that Jason committed a patch that presumably fixes the
problem earlier today.

>      Our Makefiles should be portable, because it is not difficult to
>      make them portable, and Automake does most of the work for us.
>      But libraries are more system dependent; they're not standardized
>      as well as POSIX make.
>
> Several years ago, I gave up trying to create portable makefiles, except very 
> trivial ones.  There's so many caveats.

Automake does most of the work for us.  We just have to be
careful when we write rules.

I don't think we do anything fancy with Makefiles that would
require the use of GNU make.

-- 
On Perl: "It's as if H.P. Lovecraft, returned from the dead and speaking by
seance to Larry Wall, designed a language both elegant and terrifying for his
Elder Things to write programs in, and forgot that the Shoggoths didn't turn
out quite so well in the long run." --Matt Olson