Re: makefile regression

[Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>]

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I don't really object to using GNU make; enough things require it
(probably emacs does too) that it's already installed.  It's more that
"anyone using a makefile will use gnu make" isn't a valid assumption,
especially when the documentation says "type make".

  At the very start of my Makefile branch I stated that I will use GNU
  make since the old make file already used some GNU make features.  This
  will be documented when it gets released.  Using GNU make features
  helped to keep things a bit more maintenance friendly, but before other
  things, I have a reliable documentation of what it is supposed to do and
  can be reasonably sure that it actually does that across a range of
  platforms.

It seems easy enough to document the requirement in README in the
sources, where programs traditonally list their prerequisites; I looked
there and in the usual other files and found no such requirement
explained.  I don't understand why it makes sense to defer adjusting the
source to explain what's needed until its tagged, but maybe you don't
mean that.

Separately, that would be a good place to explain what version of emacs
are supported.  I am running 24 and thus not running into too new/old,
but I now realize that's an obvious question the answer to which my
attempt to find out if the requirement to use GNU Make was documented
should have led me across.

  > This seems unfortunate; I don't understand why building org has to be so
  > complicated.  If it is complicated, it seems best to use
  > autoconf/automake, which already have worked out most of the portability
  > issues.

  Please, let's not go there.  I will implement a facility to build an
  in-place orgmode without any support from make at all.  It appears that
  this would be enough for your use-case, but I'd still still suggest to
  use GNU make.

I did use GNU make.   My reaction was not to GNU make, but that it
wasn't obvious in a minute or two what all the makefile complexity was
for.

  > (I haven't seen any discussion, but I confess to not quite keeping up
  > with with emacs-orgmode traffic.)

  It seems a better idea to stay on maint rather than on master then.

By not quite keeping up I mean that I scan all the subject lines and
read some things.  Almost all if not all of my problems on master over
the last few years have been running into real bugs.


Thanks,
Greg

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