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

[Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>]

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