Re: Require GNU Make Somehow?

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Burley <burley@gnu.org> writes:

 >>> One problem I've seen a lot is people configuring for separate
 >>> source and build directories, then forgetting to use GNU make.

I agree with Craig that this should be addressed, especially as I'm
one of the g77 lusers he's referring to (trying to test in adverse
circumstances) and I'm supposed to be an expert.  There have also been
N bug reports on the egcs list through not using GNU make.

Joe Buck:

 >> Some makes are bad enough that building in the same directory
 >> doesn't work either.

I know this is the case for egcs.  Is it also for gcc 2.8, which I
haven't tried to build in srcdir?  I don't know of any make which
failed for gcc 2.7+g77 in srcdir.  

 >> The correct autoconf way of doing things seems to be to run tests
 >> on the make that is found, to see if it has problems.

Is it even clear what the set of problems is, though?  egcs says you
must use GNU make (though I'm inclined to regard that as a bug).  It
should be strightforward just to test that and complain.

 Craig> But, right now, I'm a bit worried (and maybe too much so)
 Craig> that, for example, the cleaning up I've done of the g77
 Craig> configure and build procedures for g77 0.5.23 (which will be
 Craig> based on gcc 2.8) will start "breaking" for people who have
 Craig> "basically working" makes, perhaps even working well enough to
 Craig> have previously worked in build-separate-from-source builds.

Actually, I don't think any make I've used worked outside srcdir for
building g77+gcc-2.7, though the g77 stuff itself was OK for that, at
least at one time; it was the base gcc which failed.

 Craig> Agreed.  Now, if there was a little boilerplate toe-stubbing
 Craig> code I could stick into g77's configure.in that would stay
 Craig> nice and quiet *except* when a different-directory
 Craig> configuration was being made by a known-bad make, I'd love to
 Craig> know about it!

I'm confused about a g77 configure.in as I thought there was policy
against one, but there used to be a test in config-lang.in for srcdir
!= builddir.  That just warned about the need for GNU make at
configure time.  I'll look into sorting something out for g77's
makefile, but it presumably won't kick in until g77 starts building.

 >> Better to just have configure fail if make is not powerful enough
 >> (telling people what their options are).

 Craig> In that case, they'd either have to put gmake in their path
 Craig> early enough as `make', or be offered a way to override the
 Craig> default `make' with a command name/path of their own choosing,
 Craig> to cause configuration to work.

Indeed.  If I want GNU make, I'd be (should be) typing `gmake' on a
non-GNU system and a test is needed at compile time, not configure
time.