> On Jul 25, 2018, at 4:15 PM, Eric Blake <ebl...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/25/2018 05:06 PM, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>
>> Well, the above assumes Gnu Make, yes.
>> How many other flavors of Make does automake/autoconf work with?
>
> At the moment, all of them.
>
> Automake 2.0 (currently a work in progress if you check out the right
> branches in git) requires GNU make, for more compact makefiles at the expense
> of ditching portability to other arcane makes, now that GNU make is more
> likely to be easily obtained on modern systems. But automake 1.x still tries
> as hard as possible to produce Makefiles portable to all common make
> implementations, as long as your Makefile.am doesn't add non-portable code to
> be passed through to Makefile.
>
In the absence of Gnu make, the other choice would be to emit:
cat <<_EOF_ > /tmp/extvar$$.mk
include $(pwd)/Makefile
xyzzy:
@echo ‘\$(variable)’
_EOF_
then we could run “variable=$(make -f /tmp/extvar$$.mk xyzzy)” from inside
configure… a little uglier than using val.% as a target, but…
