From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Greg Troxel Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.devel Subject: Re: Officially require GNU Make to build Guile? (was Re: Bootstrap optimization) Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2018 20:12:32 -0400 Message-ID: References: <87y3aiam5q.fsf@netris.org> <87tvl58zvd.fsf_-_@netris.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: blaine.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain X-Trace: blaine.gmane.org 1540771936 28469 195.159.176.226 (29 Oct 2018 00:12:16 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@blaine.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:12:16 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (berkeley-unix) Cc: guile-devel To: Mark H Weaver Original-X-From: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Oct 29 01:12:12 2018 Return-path: Envelope-to: guile-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.84_2) (envelope-from ) id 1gGvAB-0007Ic-NW for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 29 Oct 2018 01:12:11 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:42732 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gGvCH-00019T-VU for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 28 Oct 2018 20:14:22 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:33397) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gGvC9-00019D-CT for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 28 Oct 2018 20:14:14 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gGvC3-0006dt-SZ for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 28 Oct 2018 20:14:13 -0400 Original-Received: from linuxpal.mit.edu ([18.62.1.14]:63547) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gGvC3-00069h-G4 for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 28 Oct 2018 20:14:07 -0400 Original-Received: by linuxpal.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 9545) id 9E0851607A; Sun, 28 Oct 2018 20:12:32 -0400 (EDT) OpenPGP: id=098ED60E X-Hashcash: 1:20:181029:mhw@netris.org::zHQQWAFRBmuAksTG:0000eIV X-Hashcash: 1:20:181029:mikael@djurfeldt.com::EScPkqqiFYLU/owt:000000000000000000000000000000000000000004cUc X-Hashcash: 1:20:181029:guile-devel@gnu.org::67c7u2gStnaLngsf:0000000000000000000000000000000000000000005xKt In-Reply-To: <87tvl58zvd.fsf_-_@netris.org> (Mark H. Weaver's message of "Sun, 28 Oct 2018 18:33:47 -0400") X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: Genre and OS details not recognized. X-Received-From: 18.62.1.14 X-BeenThere: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.21 Precedence: list List-Id: "Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library" List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "guile-devel" Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.devel:19695 Archived-At: Mark H Weaver writes: > Hmm, good question. I'm not sure, not because 2002 is too recent, but > rather because I'm not sure that GNU Make should be a requirement for > building Guile. > > Guile's README does not list GNU Make in the section of "Required > External Packages". This, along with the fact that we use Automake > which is clearly designed to produce portable Makefiles, makes me > inclined to think that if Guile depends on non-standard extensions in > GNU Make, that this is a bug. Agreed that requiring GNU Make is a bug. > On the other hand, if this is a bug, it seems that we've had this bug > for several years at least, and that non-GNU systems are already working > around it by adding GNU Make as a requirement. For example, the Guile 2 > packages in the OpenBSD and FreeBSD ports collections already list GNU > Make as a prerequisite for building Guile 2. Our README also has > "Special Instructions For Some Systems" which mentions that gmake is > required on FreeBSD 11.0. However, there's no mention of any other > non-GNU systems requiring GNU Make to build Guile. NetBSD's pkgsrc (which is portable to about 20 systems) also is marked to need GNU make. Practically, it's not a problem, because packaging systems have to deal with many programs that require GNU make anway. > So, we now have a choice. We can fully embrace a requirement on GNU > Make, or we can treat it as a bug to be fixed. > > I'm still inclined to consider it a bug, but maybe we can have the best > of both worlds here. I see that Automake has conditionals: I am also inclined to see it as a bug. Generally, most times GNU make is needed are because someone used an extension without realizing that there is make other than GNU make, vs it making a huge difference. But if it is hard to do things differently, that's somewhat tilting at windwills. But hey, that's what running scheme is all about!