On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 02:52:19PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> [ Sorry for the delay... ]
>
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 04:44:16AM -0700, Cherry George Mathew wrote:
> >--- Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> >[...]
> >
> >> What's the problem you're seeing?
> >
> >Make tree which compiles on FreeBSD doesn't compile on
> >debian... No I'm not insane, it compiled after I
> >ported freebsd's make to debian. Would you like to
> >have a look at the port ? Would it be of use ? How can
> >I make it usefull to others ? Its been "debianized".
>
> That might be useful, yes. I'm copying the debian-bsd list on this
> too; more people there might be interested in what you have. There was
> some discussion a while back about re-merging some of the different
> BSD make implementations, but I've heard nothing in a while.
I believe I was one of the folks discussing what to do with Debian's
'merged' (read: bastardized) BSD-make. My final conclusion was that it was
not going to be sane to try to update it to handle the NetBSD-ism that I
needed for building NetBSD core pieces; instead, there is a netbsd-make
package for the NetBSD toolchain.
However, said package is aware of (and deliberately tries to avoid
conflicting with) the 'main' bsd make package. I'm still not sure the best
answer isn't to make a bsd-make virtual package which all of the BSD makes
that get ported can Provide: (since something like 90%+ of packages don't
need anything that isn't shared between all four variants I know of in
common use), and stop trying to pretend they're mergeable into a single
utility.
If they were, frankly, I'd think the BSD folks would have done so some
while ago. And 'many' features get cross-ported between them and end up
commonalities. But by no means all, and cutting-edge bits (like core code)
tend to excercise the 'local' features more heavily than other stuff.
AFAIK, the Debian bsd-make started life as FreeBSD's make (mostly, anyway);
the fact that a port of the current FreeBSD make fixes the problem is just
more evidence that these packages are prone to fairly rapid evolution, and
we probably don't gain as much as we'd home from having a 'unified' one, at
least not until the sources start trying to unify.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU/kNetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
http://nienna.lightbearer.com/ `-
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