Re: [HACKERS] Re: [PATCHES] Patch for more readable parse error messages

On 2000-02-22, Tom Lane mentioned:

> > Anyone for getting rid of GNU make?
>
> No ;-). GNU make has enough important features that there is no
> near-equivalent non-GNU make. VPATH, for example.

There are other makes that support this too. While I love GNU make, too,
all the talk about allowing vanilla lex, etc. is pointless while GNU make
is required. Users don't see lex at all, they do see make.

OTOH, it is very hard for me to get an overview these days what's actually
out there in terms of other make's, other lex's, other yacc's, other
compilers. You should have an edge there (HPUX and all). Most
installations of commercial Unix vendors I get to nowadays use gcc, gmake,
flex as system tools. Yesterday I read that Sun builds Java proper with
GNU make!

The best way of going about this seems to take one of the perpetrators
(make file, gram.y, etc.) and try to port it to some given non-GNU tool
and take a look at the consequences. For example, if we get PostgreSQL to
compile with FreeBSD's make without crippling everything, that would be a
win for the user base. This may in fact be the first experiment.

> One thing I hope we will be able to do sometime soon is build in an
> object directory tree separate from the source tree... can't
> realistically do that with any non-GNU make that I've heard of.

I'm planning to work on that for 7.1. But here's an interesting tidbit:
Automake does support this feature but in its manual it claims that it
does not use any GNU make specific features. And in fact, VPATH exists in
both System V's and 4.3 BSD's make.

--
Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net 75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/ Sweden