gdb/gnulib problems with BSD operating systems

Pierre Muller
2012-03-29T14:27:48Z

I tried to compile gdb (7.4 release and current CVS)
on openbsd/netbsd/freebsd systems
(with i386 cpus, but this is probably not relevant).
I get into the same problem for all three systems:
gmake all-gdb
fails in
build/gdb/gnulib
This seems to come from the fact that
build/gdb/gnulib/Makefile
contains a line with
MAKE = make
so that despite being calls from gmake,
it calls BSD style make executable
that doesn't know how to handle some GNU specific stuff.

Changing the line in
build/gdb/gnulib/Makefile
to
MAKE = gmake
is enough to allow me to complete compilation of GDB
successfully, but I was wondering if there is not some
error somewhere.

I tried to do a global configure for which I added
an explicit
../src/configure MAKE=gmake
but even this wasn't able to get the correct value into
build/gdb/gnulib/Makefile

Is this an error in the configure script of GDB,
or should I specify which make I intent to use
differently?

Pierre Muller
GDB pascal language maintainer