Re: providing sphinx3-* binaries

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 at 01:03:27 +0300, Dmitry Shachnev wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 06:29:05PM -0400, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> >  1. there should be a more easy way to override SPHINXBUILD in
> >     quickstart-generated Makefiles. IMHO, that means SPHINXBUILD?=
> >     instead of SPHINXBUILD=
> 
> Good suggestion, I have submitted a pull request upstream:
> https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/pull/4092

I'm not sure this is necessary. If a Makefile has

	SPHINXBUILD = sphinx-build
	# or := or ::=

	some-target:
		$(SPHINXBUILD) some-arguments

then you can override it on the command-line:

	make SPHINXBUILD="python3 -m sphinx"

without needing the ?= syntax. The ?= syntax is only necessary if you want
to pick up a value from the environment:

	export SPHINXBUILD="python3 -m sphinx"; make

or if your Makefile has complicated logic that may or may not have set it
already:

	ifeq(...)
		SPHINXBUILD = $(PYTHON) -m sphinx
	endif

	SPHINXBUILD ?= sphinx-build

The Makefiles generated by GNU Automake, which are very verbose but
generally also very good about doing the right thing in the face of
strange make(1) quirks, use plain "=".

(I've said the same on the upstream PR.)

Regards,
    smcv