Re: [PATCH 0/4] Makefile improvements and cleanups

Pedro Alves
2016-11-15T16:57:10Z

On 11/13/2016 03:26 PM, Simon Marchi wrote:
> On 2016-11-13 03:49, Andreas Schwab wrote:
>> On Nov 12 2016, Simon Marchi <simon.marchi@polymtl.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> The following patches contain a few improvements and cleanups to the gdb
>>> Makefile. The starting point is when I wondered why we had to write
>>> individual
>>> rules for each source file that is located in a subdirectory.
>>
>> That's because the makefile was written to work non-GNU and/or non-POSIX
>> makes.
>
> Ok I see, I didn't know that pattern rules were GNU-specific.
>
> As an honest follow-up question: do we need to stay compatible with
> other makes than GNU make? From what I can see, Open/Net/FreeBSD all
> use gmake to build their port of GDB already.

You mean their ports scripts? Can you provide some url for reference?

John, could you comment from the FreeBSD side?

> I don't know about other
> OSes on which people build GDB on (Windows, OS X, Solaris?). If GNU
> make is readily available on these, perhaps we can consider making it a
> requirement?

I (and others) have argued before about requiring GNU Make. I think
last was here:

https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2014-05/msg00263.html

I think it makes a lot of sense. FWIW, whenever I build GDB on the compile
farm on some non-GNU machine, like FreeBSD, AIX, NetBSD, etc., I've always
used the preinstalled GNU make.

Time to just do it? We'd need a NEWS entry, I suppose.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves