maintainer mode

[Alexandre Oliva]

Andrew Tridgell <tridge at samba.anu.edu.au> writes:

> How many people use the maintainer mode in the new Makefile? I'm
> wondering if we can do without it.

Of course we can.  But we'll need all those dummy files for
subdirectories again (which does not ensure proper compilation by
itself, if some dumb user happens to remove some directory from the
build tree) and we lose automatic dependency tracking...

I'd have put all that in macros, but I fear that some broken `make'
will expand $@ at the macro definition point, instead of at the macro
use.

> that seems ridiculous. And right now it's broken and is dumping lots
> of junk on the screen while compiling.

I think I've got a fix for this problem.  I also made it a bit more
readable by moving @MAINT@ to the beginning of the line, instead of
after the TAB.  This should also fix the non-maintainer-mode problem
you mention.

> Maybe we should just go for a script called something like
> script/compile and be done with it?

That's an alternative, but it would be much slower (I think)

> I like Makefiles to be readable. the Samba one is starting to resemble
> line noise :-)

Sorry about that. :-(

Most of what I'm doing manually would be taken care of by automake,
but, as we discussed in private a few weeks ago, we'd have to give up
a single top-level Makefile and create Makefiles in each
subdirectory.

I'll commit the fix as soon as I finish testing it on with the
brand-damaged make of IRIX5 :-)

-- 
Alexandre Oliva
mailto:oliva at dcc.unicamp.br mailto:oliva at gnu.org mailto:aoliva at acm.org
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil