Re: What is BSD make?

[Aleksey Cheusov <cheusov%tut.by@localhost>]

 >>  But "created and maintained by NetBSD team" is very good trademark ;-)
 >>  This also gives non-BSD developers that this project will not die
 >>  (becomes unmaintained) in the nearest future.
 >>
 >>  I think that NetBSD make + improved and portable mk scripts can be
 >>  very important project for NetBSD itself.  Everybody knows about GNU
 >>  and their projects, everybody knows that OpenSSH/SSL came from
 >>  OpenBSD. Additional reason to make mk scripts more powerful and
 >>  portable is that portability is one of the main goal of NetBSD and
 >>  PKGSRC. I think this task is not impossible for NetBSD/pkgsrc developers.
 >>  You already have required community running everything everywhere ;-)
 >>

> Wow, I totally agree with this entire thread.  :)

> The entire netbsd userland, the build process, and pkgsrc are all
> really amazing projects that, in my opinion, deserve more recognition
> than they currently get.

> And although it's kind of contrary to using make as an autoconf
> replacement, a lot of netbsd's userland compiles pretty easily with
> auto-tools and pkgsrc's use of them.

Portability of NetBSD userspace is, in general, bad.
This is because BSD-isms are widely used in it, like strl{cat,cpy}, err, warn,
wgetln and lots of other. Using these extensions is normal for NetBSD
because they make code cleaner, shorter and safer.

But this problem may be solved easily by including

  #ifdef HAVE_CONFIG
  #include <config.h>
  #endif

to all *.c files. Other problems are already implemented in
libnbcompat.  Those who will build tools under Solaris/Linux or
whatever will do this without patching source code, just by creating
config.h and adding -DHAVE_CONFIG to CPPFLAGS.

-- 
Best regards, Aleksey Cheusov.