[changeset] Re: When do I need autogen and configure?

[John W. Eaton]

On  1-Feb-2009, Thorsten Meyer wrote:

| > In your patch, configfiles is not a file target, so shouldn't it be
| > tagged as .PHONY?
| I am not sure if I understand the purpose of .PHONY correctly. Why are the
| non-file-targets marked as .PHONY in octMakefile but not in Makefile?

Targets marked with .PHONY don't name files, so they should always
run.  Using .PHONY ensures this behavior even if a file with the name
of the target happens to be created.

The original idea of having both octMakefile and Makefile was that the
Makefile would be a simple file that any version of Make could run so
it should not have any targets like .PHONY that are specific to GNU
Make.  I think we have deviated from this goal, but not by much, so it
should be easy to fix that.  Instead of .PHONY, Makefile uses a target
called FORCE, so the effect is the same as long as a file called FORCE
is not accidentally created.

Also, the top-level Makefile should not be generated by configure so
that if users just unpacked Octave and typed "make" the top-level
Makefile would just check for octMakefile and it if was not present
print some messages telling people to run configure.  I'm not sure why
it is now distributed as a .in file, as that was never the intent.
Also, it should not have any substitutions in it anyway.

jwe