compatibility Re: link: "Recursive Make Considered Harmful"

["George Georgalis" <george@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 11:41:06AM +1000, Andrew Hacking wrote:
>On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 22:22, Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote:
>> -On [20050111 12:42], Christopher Vance (christopher@xxxxxx) wrote:
>> 
>> I agree to that.  I am just hard thinking if this is a reasonable
>> assumption.  I cannot envision much right now that need external shell
>> scripting or such given a sufficiently decent command set inside the build
>> tool.
>Some places where I have been forced to use shell variable assignment in
>makefiles:
>    - os/arch/platform detection eg: 'uname' for multi-platform builds.
>    - converting pathnames (when dealing with Windoze systems)
>    - wild-carding, eg: just pull in *.c as sources without having to
>specify them manually.
>    - interfacing to other build systems to extract variables
>    - interfacing to source code control systems
>

A few months back Matt D had mentioned the idea of compatibility.h, ahem,
portability.h

    Then instead of adding quirks for various OS's we could require that
    the platform provide the <portability.h> file according to the
    standard <snip> portability.h would have things like:

    #define _SPS_HAS_SENDFILE_A_        1       /* type A sendfile */
    #define _SPS_HAS_SENDFILE_B_        1       /* type B sendfile */
    #define _SPS_HAS_VSNPRINTF          1       /* vsnprintf supported */

Anymore thoughts on the idea?

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george@xxxxxxxxx