On Tue, 2011 Dec 6 16:26-0700, Eric Blake wrote: > > Yes, since we already do other configure checks for make capabilities, > and substitute that into Makefile.in when producing Makefile. And no > one said we have to run all the checks on all the platforms - it may > be sufficient to detect multiple features on a single make probe run, > at least for GNU make, to minimize forking in the common case.
That would help, surely. But I don't see why you would want to add yet another moving part if there were a way to avoid it. I mean, if $({}) violated POSIX, or there were known implementations that could not tolerate curlies, then sure. But the concerns that have been expressed here are basically stylistic in nature, and while I don't disregard those, I would think they're not nearly as important. As far as I can see, this is on par with using "test $? != 0" instead of -ne, or expr(1) instead of $((...)). Yes, it's less pretty, but it runs on more systems than the pretty code. And isn't that what really matters, at the end of the day? > The user is already obligated to run the same make that was on the > PATH when they ran configure, or to run './configure > MAKE=/path/to/make' to hard-code their preference of make. Automake > already generates Makefile.in that has substitutions that are implementation- > specific; for example, see how @SET_MAKE@, @am__include@, @am__quote@, > and so forth are hard-coded to the make implementation detected at > configure time. I was vaguely aware of SET_MAKE, but I didn't know that using the same make program as configure detected was a basic premise of the system. I retract that critique, then. --Daniel -- Daniel Richard G. || sk...@iskunk.org My ASCII-art .sig got a bad case of Times New Roman.