Re: FYI: bootstrap with tests/generate.awk!

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 01:49:54PM +0200, Akim Demaille wrote:
> 
> I'm just militating for the centralization of the information.  I'm
> not saying pushing users to make bootstrap is a good thing,
> ./bootstrap is better.  But the *content*, IMHO, belongs to
> Makefile.am.

I am half convinced.   From your argument below I can see the
advantage in having bootstrap-foo targets, but I still think
maintaining all this by hand in each project is far more work than a
simple list of commands to run in a script.

> Yet using targets *is* a good thing in MHO.  You can have
> bootstrap-automake, bootstrap-foo etc. which are constant across all
> the packages etc.  All that remains to write is
> 
> bootstrap: bootstrap-autoconf bootstrap-automake
> 
> etc.
> 
> In addition you may depend upon dependencies to avoid useless
> bootstrap targets.  Not that it matters actually ;)

If automake generated the majority of them by default, then I would be
right behind you -- tailoring one or two extra targets when a project
uses some unusual generated files is no big deal.  But if I have to
maintain the bootstrap mechanism for half a dozen projects, each
requiring a different combination of bison, flex, gettextize,
libtoolize, shtoolize, yadda yadda yadda, the easiest way to do it is
think about it carefully once, and list the correct commands in a
standard script.  I'll grant you that there is probably not a great
deal of additional effort required to add rules to Makefile.am, but on
some level they seem to `pollute' the purity of a typical 5 line top
level Makefile.am.

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
  ())_. Gary V. Vaughan     gary@(oranda.demon.co.uk|gnu.org)
  ( '/  Research Scientist  http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk       ,_())____
  / )=  GNU Hacker          http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool  \'      `&
`(_~)_  Tech' Author        http://sources.redhat.com/autobook   =`---d__/