Hi Ingo, First of all, I mean no disrespect to you personally, I've enjoyed your posts to this list.
On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 05:31:57AM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 06:26:14AM +1100, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > >> At 2022-03-28T12:11:32-0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > >>> I'm a little late, are you guys trying to make things build with > >>> different make(1) implementations? > > >> Yes. Apparently that has worked in the past and does again after Ingo's > >> commits of the past week. > > >>> Because that is the path to heartache. > > >> I'm learning that. :-| > > > And you will _keep_ learning it, over and over. > > You are exaggerating. Perhaps things have gotten dramatically better in the last 5 years but I very much doubt it. > > The idea that you, someone working on groff for free, have to jump > > through more hoops to keep things going because of fear-of-copyleft, > > is just insane. Completely unreasonable, bigger fish to fry. > > Not jump through hoops, just adhere to standard portability practice. Tomato, Tomahto. Even if he just insisted on GNU make, I'm pretty sure we ran into compat problems across different versions of GNU make. Why make him have to deal with extra patches for some oddball make for a platform that has very few users? If you were talking about MacOS, OK, maybe but I'd still point out that GNU make works fine there. What's next? Dragonfly BSD has some weirder make and he's supposed to deal with that? > What next? Build only with Bash, GNU awk, GNU sed, GNU grep, > GNU mkdir, Bison, GCC, GNU ld, GNU ar, and glibc? How is not being > gratuitiously non-portable with respect to make(1) different from not > being gratuitiously non-portable in any other respect? Rather than gratuitious, it is a "pick your battles". You are talking to a guy that used to carry around the sources to Sys III (I think) make and would port it to whatever box he was on at the time (I was a contractor originally, I worked on everything). I much prefer a simple make syntax. But my guys wanted GNU make so I sucked it up and learned that because it just wasn't a battle I wanted to fight. Fighting for one make syntax vs "portable" make syntax, yeah, I'd fight that battle. Good luck making your makefiles be portable to BSD make, they killed that idea. It's not my call, I'm not doing the work. But if Branden wanted to insist on one make syntax, he'd have my whole hearted support. I don't care which one, pick one. Just one.
