[Groff] Re: groff build/release engineering

[Werner LEMBERG]

> What if gnumake could only be built using a gnumake Makefile?

Off-topic: You can always try `makepp', written in Perl, which is
fairly compatible to GNU make.

> Doing this would also conflict with one of the key objectives of the
> GNU project: making its software available on the widest range of
> platforms.

I'm not sure that this is still the very objective of the GNU project,
given that GNU/Linux provides a free platform with all bells and
whistles.  Anyway, I will try to make groff compile on as many
platforms as possible.

> In the case of groff, it didn't used to rely on gnu make.  or bash.
> Somebody changed this even though the old (POSIX standard?) makefile
> worked just fine.  And on a lot more platforms too.  So something
> that wasn't broken got "fixed".

This was a mistake and has been fixed meanwhile.  In case you find
other problems please report.

> It's things like hardwiring /bin/bash into the autoconfiguration.

???  Autoconf runs on much more platforms today than in former
times!  There might be bugs, but it doesn't make any assumption on a
specific shell.  Please go into detail.

> I'm not irked by groff builds depending on gnumake. [Is this also
> true for the Windows builds? Not that I care about them...] However
> I am disappointed that this is an implicit assumption.

It isn't.


    Werner