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I wish standard (POSIX) Make would be sufficient but it frequently isn't. While some Make features from GNU and BSD Make made it into the POSIX spec (such as "i

I wish standard (POSIX) Make would be sufficient but it frequently isn't. While some Make features from GNU and BSD Make made it into the POSIX spec (such as "include"), I frequently find myself desiring a more orthogonal facility to integrate output of external programs into Make builds. That is, by using POSIX Make's "VAR=`cmd`" syntax with backtick-quoted commands (or other shell evaluation syntax), you can define macros programmatically for incorporation into build rules as lazily evaluated text substitution variables, but you can use those only in build rules rather than in requisites or targets (where they get interpreted verbatim). A partial solution would be adopting GNU Make's eager evaluation syntax (VAR:=`...`) into POSIX. OTOH, while I'm not a big fan of autotools internals (especially libtool), being able to run "./configure && make install" on tens of thousands of F/OSS packages is something I'd hate to loose. In fact, the extreme consistency in installation procedures (including use of pkg_conf etc.) and discipline in directory layout accross so many F/OSS packages is something I very much admire, given it's an unexpected outcome of a "Bazaar" style development model.

dTal 10y ago
>"./configure && make install" You forgot 'make'! I'm tempted to turn this into a cheap shot about how the consistency obviously isn't worth much, but I won't.
- dfox 10y ago
  Explicitly doing 'make' is redundant for makefiles generated by any version of automake I've ever used. Dependencies are setup correctly so that install also builds everything that it installs and isn't already uptodate (I'm not sure whether 'install' also explicitly depends on 'all')
  - derefr 10y ago
    The usual reason to separate them is that if you're installing to a prefix that needs root privileges to write to, then you'll be doing something like: ./configure && make && sudo make install If you do this instead: ./configure && sudo make install ...then the compiler toolchain gets invoked as root and all the intermediate build products end up owned by root.
    - xtreme 10y ago
      There is another reason. `make -j4 && make install' would be faster than just `make install' (multi-process vs. single-process).
      - atso 10y ago
        You can do `make -j4 install`. Works as intended.

dTal 10y ago

>"./configure && make install" You forgot 'make'! I'm tempted to turn this into a cheap shot about how the consistency obviously isn't worth much, but I won't.

dfox 10y ago
Explicitly doing 'make' is redundant for makefiles generated by any version of automake I've ever used. Dependencies are setup correctly so that install also builds everything that it installs and isn't already uptodate (I'm not sure whether 'install' also explicitly depends on 'all')
- derefr 10y ago
  The usual reason to separate them is that if you're installing to a prefix that needs root privileges to write to, then you'll be doing something like: ./configure && make && sudo make install If you do this instead: ./configure && sudo make install ...then the compiler toolchain gets invoked as root and all the intermediate build products end up owned by root.
  - xtreme 10y ago
    There is another reason. `make -j4 && make install' would be faster than just `make install' (multi-process vs. single-process).
    - atso 10y ago
      You can do `make -j4 install`. Works as intended.