At 10:55 PM 4/8/99 -0500, Philip Guenther wrote:
It means that Berkeley make inherits the value of the SHELL variable
from the environment, instead of setting it to the Bourne shell and
only letting the makefile or command line override it. Why is this
'perverted'? To quote the GNU make info pages:
Unlike most variables, the variable `SHELL' is never set from the
environment. This is because the `SHELL' environment variable is used
to specify your personal choice of shell program for interactive use.
It would be very bad for personal choices like this to affect the
functioning of makefiles. *Note Variables from the Environment:
Sorry, but I'm not "GNUish." ;-) It seems to me that whatever shell the user
is used to -- and knows -- ought to be the one that is used to interpret
the commands that he or she writes. I know that it is Richard Stallman's
desire to force bash and other GPLed software upon others, but I don't
personally think it's appropriate to do so. I always specify the shell
explicitly in Makefiles I distribute if it matters... but I do my best
to make sure it doesn't matter.
...
It might be a good idea to detect a BSD-based system and set BASEDIR and ETCRC
to /usr/local/whatever automatically. Maybe this is something worth adding to
the Makefile. I don't know if /etc/procmailrcs should also follow, but it
seems
reasonable for it to do so.
If you previously were using a package from the ports collection and
you decide to move to a version not yet included therein, then you
should examine and possibly apply each patch in the ports tree to the
new version. I've poked around the ports tree some just now and
patches are included not only to set a given directory arrangment but
also to deal with random other configuration issues and make
conventions. Did you remember to disable fcntl() locking when you
upgraded to 3.13.1? That's in the same patch as the change to ETCRC
and ETCRCS.
No, I didn't disable fcntl() locking -- I only changed that one path.
Are there other things that should be changed? If so, perhaps they
should be in the Makefile as well! Many people, I expect, will build
directly from your distribution rather than going to the FreeBSD
ports. As with Apache, it may make sense to handle OS issues in the
Makefile....
--Brett