Re: [AC21.5] Remove GNUish := from modules Makefiles

Adrian Aichner <adrian(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: End users don't compile the packages; they just download them. End users don't build the web pages; they just view them. End users DO build XEmacs from sources. Requiring GNU make for XEmacs itself is a much more significant step than requiring it for the packages and xemacsweb. I do. I think we will decrease our pool of users if we drop support for non-GNU makes. It isn't that there are people who cannot build and install GNU make; it's the nuisance factor. Some sysadmins may just refuse to play along. And it isn't as though we are in terrible shape, either. We currently have a set of Makefiles that seem to work pretty well on the makes people are currently using. Throwing that all away because of a few nuisances seems a bit extreme. The current problem appears to be that there exists a make that fails to expand variables occurring inside of a pattern matching expression on the right hand side of an =. Since the same make successfully expands those variables when := is used instead, we can easily write a configure test to detect and work around this. I'll do just that in a few minutes. If we were starting from scratch, I would worry about the make variants. But we already have a bunch of infrastructure for dealing with them. I think it is worth a little effort now and then to keep up with those variants. Dump the work on me if nobody else wants to do it. I'll collect all the make variants I can find and successfully build on some platform I have and try them out from time to time. -- Jerry James http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~james/