Re: [gtk-list] Re: IRIX prob; get/change menu item label prob

[Erik Mouw <J A K Mouw its tudelft nl>]

On Wed, 21 Apr 1999 03:44:21 +0200 (CEST), gtk-list@redhat.com (Tim Janik) wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Erik Mouw wrote:
>> Good idea, but in my opinion it's a waste of time to solve the non-GNU
>> make problem in the GTK+ project. It should be solved in the automake
>> package, but I doubt it really will. There are some features in automake
>> that some vendor supplied make utilities don't have, like the VPATH
>> feature (do the makefiles in GLIB/GTK support this?). In the mean time, we
>> can just tell people to use GNU make.  
> 
> you can't really get complex packages, i.e. with different source
> directories, generated sources and included dependancies, to build without
> VPATH. thus, make with srcdir!=builddir or make distcheck depend
> on VPATH out of the automake box. no way for gtk to get around that.

I don't agree. I think a make utility that doesn't support VPATH (but does
support all other needed GNU make features) will be sufficient to
_compile_ GTK+, but if you want to do special things like make with
srcdir!=builddir you really need the VPATH feature.

Generated sources are also not a problem. I've worked on packages with
generated sources (mostly flex+bison generated stuff) that compiled
without a problem with vendor supplied make utilities. As long as there is
a rule that tells make how to generated the source, nothing goes wrong.

The automatic generated dependency stuff is however a problem, because
automake assumes that every C compiler is a GNU C compiler and just tells
the compiler to use the -MD flag to generate dependencies. As a
workaround, you can use the "--include-deps" for automake.


Erik

-- 
J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department
of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems,
Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031,  2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Phone: +31-15-2785859  Fax: +31-15-2781843  Email J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl
WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/