Re: [Groff] new automake system

[Bertrand Garrigues]

Blake,

On Tue, Sep 23 2014 at 11:10:59 PM, Blake McBride <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thanks for the response.  IMO, if the new make system requires a
> download of something that is already built and installed on my
> machine, 

I understand that you find annoying to download about 60 Mo when only a
small part will be used (we use wcwidth from gnulib and also a few
helper scripts, they are already commited in the current build system).

> then the new make system is significantly worse than using
> the standard ./ configure.

However you can't compare the bootstrap script with the configure script
(which is also used by the new system). `boostrap' is about preparing
everything that is needed to run `configure' (to sum up: downloading
gnulib and calling autoreconf). On the current build system, this job is
done mostly manually: gnulib is integrated manually and by the way
causes a call of its own configure script, and you must be carefull when
calling autoreconf as you can, for example, override aclocal.m4 (this
happened recently on master). The drawback of downloading the whole
gnulib is largely balanced, in my opinion, by some ease of use and a
less error-prone build system.

Regards,

--
Bertrand Garrigues