Re: [AD] doc building patterns (was: Release Candidate 3)

[George Foot <gfoot@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 12:28:46PM +0100, Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 12:54:52PM +1100, Peter Wang wrote:
> >    tjaden@xxxxxxxxxx ~/cvs/allegro $ pmake      
> >    pmake: Don't know how to make target `docs/texi/allegro.texi'
> > 
> > BTW, BSD make is available as `pmake' under Linux.  It comes with
> > Mandrake, IIRC.
> 
> After hours of tesing I have given up. pmake doesn't seem to have
> anything in common with GNU make except for variable substitution,
> so not even the '%.txt' rules work. The only manual I could get didn't
> explain how dependencies could be automatic other than writting all the
> dependency tree _manually_, and examples seemed to use obscure includes
> which pointed at heavily convulted files (with nested includes) which
> pregenerated rules with sed and shell expansion tricks.
> 
> Other than writting all rules manually (a pain to maintain), the only
> solutions I see are either adding doc rule generation through makefile's
> depend target and a custom script, or finding somebody who knows how to
> write pmake files, and ifdefing the whole doc part.
> 
> It can't be so difficult to write a makefile compatible with pmake,
> but I seem unable to do that, sorry.

Sometimes reading the GNU make manual I hate the way they seem
to have such a domineering attitude -- it's like: "our make
program is better than all the others, so use all these special
features and don't worry about compatibility, you can install
gnu make on any system".  OTOH some of their features are nice
and powerful.  Sigh.

I think BSD systems tend to have `gmake' instealled anyway,
perhaps the simplest fix is just to tell people to use that.

BTW about the pattern rules, I think you have to write something
like:

    .txt._tx:
    	(commands)

but I've never done it and this doesn't seem to work with GNU
Make (so I probably got the syntax wrong).

George