Re: building groff with GNU Make and *BSD Make

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 06:26:14AM +1100, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Larry,
> 
> At 2022-03-28T12:11:32-0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > > Yes, i admit there is some fragility in OpenBSD make in this respect.
> > 
> > I'm a little late, are you guys trying to make things build with
> > different make(1) implementations?
> 
> Yes.  Apparently that has worked in the past and does again after Ingo's
> commits of the past week.
> 
> > Because that is the path to heartache.
> 
> I'm learning that.  :-|

And you will _keep_ learning it, over and over.

> > Just pick one, we picked GNU make, not my favorite by any stretch but
> > it runs everywhere.  Build the makefiles for that make and call it a
> > day.
> 
> Some people will sign a thousand EULAs before touching one copylefted
> byte.  That doesn't describe Ingo, but it does describe some of the
> people he works with.

"And that's why they can't have nice things".  If the openbsd people want
to be that weird, they get to maintain their own port of groff.  groff
itself is copylefted, is it not?  So if we're already over the copyleft
"cliff", how does GNU make screw things up?

If you can't deal with GNU make (and I don't blame you, not for copyleft
issues, it just seemed like it was trying to be yet another programming
"language" and you can do all that crap by calling /bin/sh and cpus are
fast enough, so....), then pick a make that is portable (for God's sake,
not BSD make, they went and invented yet another programming "language")
and use that.

Personally, I'd tell people that can't deal with GNU make "suck it, if
you don't like it, maitain it yourself, groff builds with GNU make."

I'm as much a hater of the copyleft as a lot of people but pragmatic
trumps religion when it comes to software.  Or it should.

The idea that you, someone working on groff for free, have to jump 
through more hoops to keep things going because of fear-of-copyleft,
is just insane.  Completely unreasonable, bigger fish to fry.