Re: src/Makefile unhelpful

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > I understood, but I think it isn't needed even once, because we don't
  > care about the exact command unless we run into some trouble.

I agree.  I brought this up because I did run into some kind of trouble,
and I could not find a way to see what the commands actually were.

I proposed a solution with the advantage that you don't need to remember
how to invoke it.

  > The command is quite long, so outputting it even once will write a lot
  > of stuff to the screen, stuff that we almost always ignore.

That is normal for output from make.  Most of the output from make, we
normally ignore.  Each line of output is useful when it is pertinent
to some problem.  With hundreds of lines of that, there is no harm
adding a few lines more.

  > It's a general Autoconf-based solution many/all GNU projects use, so
  > if we want to change that to something more memorable, we should
  > change that across the board.

In reaching that conclusion you have implicitly rejected other kinds
of solutions.  Unfortunately, this one has a fatal flaw: the autotools
don't have a lot of people working on them.  If there were a good
solution in Autoconf or Automake, it would probably not get
implemented.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)