Re: [lmi] Cygwin build failure

[Greg Chicares]

On 2019-04-30 23:14, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> [this is not very important, but keeping up with the one-thing-at-a-time
>  principle, let me address this in a separate message]
> 
> On Tue, 30 Apr 2019 22:04:22 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> GC> Yet we could do
> GC>   make prefix=/opt/lmi/whatever ad_hoc_dir=/tmp/something -f 
> install_mingw.make
> GC> in which case the parentage is broken.
> 
>  I think trying to fool proof makefiles is a lost cause

Yeah.

I hoped for all the simplicity of a declarative language and all the
power of shell scripts. That was the dream. Instead, I got all the
pitfalls of shell scripts, embedded in a weird declarative language
that has arisen by evolution rather than by design. And I'm afraid
I made things worse by trying to favor the declarative paradigm for
some things that could have been done more simply in another way.

At least I never rewrote those makefiles using $(eval).

>  So I strongly believe that makefiles should be as simple and short as
> possible rather than as smart as possible and IMNSHO lmi makefiles are
> already towards the too smart end of the spectrum, so any simplification
> would be welcome. In fact, maybe replacing this makefile with another shell
> script wouldn't be a bad idea?

Sure. I personally am not going to do that today. But feel free.
I don't think I've ever had to ask you how the wx-install scripts
you wrote actually work.