On Fri, 7 May 1999, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> On Thu, 6 May 1999 mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu wrote:
> > Anyone know if tmake exists somewhere in the package system?  I looked
> > some for it but didn't see it.  I was looking because I'm starting to try
> > out (and make a package out of) a program which uses qt and it wants to
> > use tmake.  It looks like troll-tech (the qt place) really wants tmake to
> > be used for qt programs.
> > 
> > Unless I hear otherwise, I guess I'll make a tmake package too.
> 

> We have kde in pkgsrc, and by what I know, it doesn't need a special make
> (well, maybe gmake) to build.

I'll take a look at some of the kde stuff.  Basically, 'tmake' is a perl
script which processes some stuff and generates a Makefile.  I started
looking at it and it looks pretty ugly to me.  Sort of like imake in that
lots of machine configuration stuff is stored in a big template file.  It
looks like it has the potential to be hard to make it into a clean
package.  Stuff like it has several paths already hard coded into it. The
authors claim it works better than GNU autoconf, but its already not
working for me....

I may just try out the program which wants 'tmake' for building and see if
its worth my effort to try and cleanly do a tmake package to support it.

I suppose my other option is to simply ship the Makefile it generated on
my machine (with a few things changed to make it more portable) as a
patch.  That would avoid tmake and its headaches.  The generated Makefile
looks very straightforward and with a couple of insertions of ${X11BASE}
and ${LOCALBASE} and some rpath stuff in some key places it would probably
be fine.

-Dan