Re: ./configure fails to link test program due to missing dependencies

From: Paul Smith <paul@mad-scientist.net>
Date: Sep 26, 2024, 19:42 UTC
Message-ID: <10debb75cf7d29bc7fb907feae544769f2f2e3be.camel@mad-scientist.net>
In-Reply-To: <6e3ac135-8357-4d2d-a49b-de7f1ab4da95@gmail.com>

On Wed, 2024-09-25 at 21:35 -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On 9/25/24 11:33 AM, Paul Smith wrote:
> > On Tue, 2024-09-24 at 10:39 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > > Our dependance of heavy use of GNU-ism in our Makefiles makes an
> > > argument that make is the common denominator a fairly weak one,
> > > so
> > > the single one that eventually we use does not have to be "make",
> > > but it has to be something available widely and easy to learn.
> > 
> > Regardless of what one might imagine :), I am not advocating GNU
> > Make as the perfect solution: it certainly has downsides and
> > disadvantages.
> 
> :)
> 
> I've read your article about why people should use autoconf!
> 
> (By the way: I had a bit of a... chuckle, when I read in your
> previous email that as the GNU maintainer of Make, you build lots of
> projects with Make or CMake, but not with GNU autoconf / automake. I
> assume that was just bad wording?)

This is actually part of my $DAYJOB, not as the maintainer of GNU Make. It's not even part of my job there, but I like to have modern tools and I hate to mandate certain distributions and distro releases for everyone, so I build a complete toolchain including its own sysroot that everyone checks out from a Git repo to build our product.

At my $DAYJOB we use CMake, actually, so I'm also very familiar with it.

But when I said "make" previously I meant to encompass autoconf projects. You're right, it's not really precise to compare make to cmake since cmake build makefiles as well. It's more accurate to compare it to autoconf.

So, I should have said "autoconf and cmake" :)

However there are also projects that use raw makefiles and no build generator tools.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that requiring Python is a show- stopper for Git. There are lots of options depending on needs. But it can't be argued that it's not more work for the builder than using GNU Make.

Maybe this is will be deemed not worth worrying about given the alternatives, and I wouldn't argue with that. I just raise it so it can be given consideration before a decision is made to (for example) drop support for makefiles.