Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2002 14:44:31 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Ian <freebsd@damnhippie.dyndns.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Improving GNU make compatibility in BSD make (+ patch) Message-ID: <3CF9403F.A3BD44E6@mindspring.com> References: <B91E644B.D7D9%freebsd@damnhippie.dyndns.org>
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Ian wrote: > On 05/31/02 19:53, Jos Backus wrote: > > Fyi: it appears nobody is really interested in having BSD make and GNU make > > converge a little, so I am not going waste any more time on this. > > Actually, I think it's a great idea. It should make life much easier for > people creating and maintaining ports. The tone of Terry's reply to your > mail seemed to be "My opinion is the only one that counts here and I > disagree with you." My advice would be to not mistake the sheer volume of > Terry's constant bitching at anyone trying to do real productive work with > anything FreeBSD-policy-like. That's not really fair. *I'm* the one who pointed out that, so far, he only got four opinions, other than his own, and that it was "Memorial Day Week", and the opinions were split equally for those actually expressing something other than "I don't care", so throwing in the towel too easily was a bad thing. It's really annoying that you've attempted to dismiss my concerns as "bitching". If you think it's a good idea, then please, argue on technical merit; I've restricted myself to technical arguments, the least you could do is to do the same. As to your statement "It should make life much easier for > people creating and maintaining ports.": No, it won't. What it will do is result in some small subset of ports that expect GNU make working with BSD make, until some random point in the future, when they use a GNU make feature that's not implemented. You either need to make it a superset, or you need to not bother. The intersection set is not useful, particularly if it takes part of the name space, and doesn't give back any new functionality. BSD make can't afford this, since it has an historical tradition of using single characters for options. The GNU tradition, if there is one, is to add features that take a paragraph to invoke (e.g. if we go down this road, we are on the road to getopt_long problems, like those recently discussed in -ports and -current). BSD make must be extremely frugal with its name space, because it is so small, compared to the name space of GNU make. There are already problems with name space collisions with other BSD make implementations symbol option variables. If I had to make a choice between slowly converging on GNU make vs. just switching over to GNU make, I would say that FreeBSD ought to "just switch over". I would object to that, since it would bloat Makefiles, and make us incompatabile with other BSDs. As you redundantly point out (since I've already pointed it out three times, now, belieing your characterization of "bitching" so that you can avoid the technical problems with your position), yeah, that's my opinion. But it's one informed by 22 years of programming experience. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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