* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 08:26:42PM CET: > On Thursday 27 January 2011, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > > I must admit that I still don't like this a lot. BSD is free software, > > we shouldn't have to put ugly workarounds in place for it, and this > > workaround does have some ugliness to it. > > > But IMHO its ugliness pales when confronted with that of other > VPATH-related workarounds that are currently in automake: > `test -f '$<' || echo $(srcdir)`/$<
Sure. But first off, one ugliness should not hold as excuse for another, second, we cannot do much about IRIX/Sun make (well, at least we could not, at the time). > And moreover, while this last ugliness is imposed to every make > implementation, even the well-behaved ones, the ugliness introduced > by my patch only affects the "offending" make implementations > (here, BSD make). (FWIW, it's on my table to eliminate the above for GNU make, and in turn to maybe fix depend2 to use it everywhere for non-GNU, as it still lacks uses cases.) > > Here's a radically different idea: get them to fix/improve their make. > > > > What do you think about this? > > > That's surely good in the long run and for the future, but it won't help > with older versions of FreeBSD. > > Also, I'm halfway through an automake patch on the lines I've sketched, > and I can say that it seems remarkably easy at this point ... How do you ensure in your patch that 'make clean' does not create files? Likewise distdir? Does 'make -n' create files (for any target)? Thanks, Ralf