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Re: Why does gnulib use makefile rules rather than configure?


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: Why does gnulib use makefile rules rather than configure?
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2019 16:40:36 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.8.0

On 9/8/19 2:06 PM, Paul Smith wrote:
Why can't we add
these headers as AC_CONFIG_FILES() and allow them to be generated by
the configure script, instead of requiring makefile rules to do it?

Makefile rules can do things that an Autoconf substitition can't, or at least can't do easily. For example, the arpa_inet module (the 2nd one I looked at in response to your email) doesn't merely substitute; it also copies three files' contents into lib/arpa_inet.h.

Typically 'make' beats 'configure' to do this sort of thing, since 'make' is more powerful - e.g., it can run in parallel.

Admittedly GNU Make is a special case, since you want to build it without having 'make'. And if it's just a few Gnulib modules and they're not doing anything fancy, perhaps we can modify the modules to use 'configure' substitutions instead of 'make' rules. On the other hand perhaps it's time to stop worrying about building GNU make without a 'make'. We don't worry that GCC can't be built on a system without a C compiler, so why worry about building GNU Make on a system without 'make'?



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