[ REQ 5663]: More Makefile madness...

[Robert_Patrick at methi.ndim.edrc.cmu.edu]

Okay, I give up!  I carefully went through all of your Makefiles and made LN a 
global variable so I could use symbolic links, rather than hard links.  Then, 
I went through and fixed all the symbolic links that tar created (using the L 
option) from your hard links.  I did all of this thinking that this would 
allow me to compile in AFS. WRONG!

It looks like the only way I'm going to be able to use your code is to rewrite 
every Makefile in the whole tree. This really SUCKS!

Can I make a couple of suggestions?

1.) Why don't you clean up your Makefiles and not use links at all?  There is 
absolutely no reason to do things like "ln foo.c ..", you should either fix 
your Makefiles to use the right paths (e.g., ${CC} -c ${MACHTYPE}/foo.c -o 
${MACHTYPE}/foo.o) or, if that is impractical, simply make a unique Makefile 
for every MACHTYPE in every subdirectory.  It appears you're trying to be 
clever (which is really cool) but you're going about it in a way that limits 
the usefulness of your code (since it assumes that the source tree still 
exists).

2.) Why don't you make it so that everything that is needed is "installed" by 
'make install'?  I want to install the binaries (and any other necessary 
files) for multiple platforms (and multiple x11 platforms at that) from a 
single source tree and not have the binaries looking back into the source tree 
for
stuff (e.g., gvx!!!).

3.) make clean doesn't really make clean because it leave all the binaries 
scattered throughout the source tree.  This is really undesirable!  If you 
like this, make a "reallyclean" target to blow away everything!

4.) Why the heck do you grope around in the stdio buffers?  You really don't 
have to do this and it makes the code less portable (and it's bad style since 
the FILE type is supposed to be an opaque type).  Why not just use fnctl()?

Frustrated in PA...