[Chicken-hackers] Re: separate build directory support for Chicken

[Aleksej Saushev]

Ivan Shmakov <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> Alex Queiroz <address@hidden> writes:
>
>  >> The following patch implements the support for building in a
>  >> separate directory, like:
>
>  > Just a thought but, won't adding lots of features to the plain
>  > makefiles build system make it so complex as to become unmanageable?
>
>       Actually, I'm planning a build system rewrite which, by
>       utilising some of the GNU Make features, will make the build
>       system /much more/ manageable.  I've already reduced rules.make
>       down to 38 KiB (i. e., by 40%) and it doesn't look that I'm
>       going to stop just yet.

Why have you chosen GNU make then?  BSD make OBJDIR does what you want 
without separate build directory preparation step.

You can do the same OBJDIR with GNU make too, why sticking to unintuitive
concept?  Any reasoning?

>       The primary cause for delaying the rewrite is that I'm trying to
>       prepare a script, so that the validness of the changes could be
>       more easily checked.  (Though it obviously isn't strictly
>       necessary.)
>
> PS.  Would there be a plenty of Make and Autotools experts among the
>       Chicken developers, I'd be happy to suggest a transition to
>       Autotools.  Apparently, it's not the case, so I'm trying to do
>       my best with the plain GNU Make-based build system.

Autotools are not needed as long as system properly advertises itself
or its own properties.  Operating systems are not that diverse nowadays,
hence guessing is mostly trivial, but it takes time to maintain
those horrible "configure" scripts.