Re: Adventures in making make

[Paul D. Smith]

The short answer is, you should go get the latest beta:

    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/make/make-3.81beta4.tar.gz

It's a ready-to-build (with a configure etc.) version of make that's
pretty recent.


The longer answer is, the GNU make maintainers (er... that's me :-))
have made a decision that derived files such as configure, Makefile.in,
etc. are not going to be checked into CVS.  Some other projects do check
them in, but my experience with those projects is that it's a big PITA.

So, if you want to build from CVS you will need to have a relatively
recent autoconf, automake, and gettext installed on your system, plus
have access to CVS, a prior version of GNU make (!), have wget, and some
other tools.

If you don't want to install these extra tools globally on your system
you can easily install them in some private area with "cd autoconf &&
./configure --prefix=/my/private/area && make && make install"
etc. (this is what I do on my systems, actually, so I'm not impacted by
my distribution updates).


Once you have all these tools you can use the instructions in
README.cvs.


When I create a release (such as the beta above) I use special rules to
create a distribution that are provided as a standard part of automake,
which bundles up all the derived files like configure, etc. from the
build and creates an end-user release tarball that does not require any
of these "developer" tools.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
 http://www.gnu.org                      http://make.paulandlesley.org
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist