GNU Make configure options

[Firestryke31]

I am trying to build GNU Make under MSYS. Why? Because I flippin' want to, that's why. That and I won't have to deal with 100 retarded DLLs that I can't find because the distro can't be assed to put them in an easy to find place. So I just want to let people to know that I don't want you to tell me "just download xyz."

I can get a working make.exe with $(srcPath)/configure && make && make install, but it uses Windows style paths. Normally I think this would be a good thing (yay it works with cmd.exe!) but I'm trying to use it with MSYS's sh, so it treats the \ as the start of an escape sequence and butchers the paths for the stuff make is trying to do. What I'm looking for is a way to tell make's ./configure to not use DOS-style paths even though they're available, but apparently there's no such thing as a configure option list for this stupid thing.

Could someone point me to a list of the configure options for building the GNU make tool? I'm trying to make Gnu Make 3.81 btw.

[Candy]

As much as you appear to hate "download X" replies, I will still give you one because I think it'll save you time.

Try downloading Cygwin and tell it to do a full install. That includes make & a decent bash. It also makes sure that anything you compile under it knows you're using cygwin and won't use backslashes.

[Firestryke31]

I'm not looking to save time, and I'm not downloading Cygwin when MSYS works for me almost perfectly. I'm trying to avoid dependencies on too many DLLs. I could just as easily download the precompiled MSYS Make 3.81 but I don't want to. I want to build it.

So once again, don't tell me "just download xyz." Just give me a list of the configure options. That's all I want right now. Is it some kind of elite secret I'm not allowed to know or something?

Edit: Meh, in the end I just cheated. I edited the configure script to say no even if it found dos-style paths and now I'm compiling GCC 4.5.0 for i686-pc-mingw. So far so good. Maybe if I'm lucky this one won't give me a retarded dependency on libgcc-s-dw2-1.dll without asking me.

[Creature]

At the risk of sounding a newbie or having misunderstood the problem, have you tried using -static to statically link all libraries instead of using DLL's? I remember doing that for a g++ program to avoid having a couple of DLL's. I'm not sure it will save you from all DLL's though, but it worked for me.

[Firestryke31]

Really all I wanted was a list of the GNU Make configure options. ./configure --help is useless as all it gives me are the normal options available to all ./configure scripts.

I still would like the list posted here in case some other poor fool decides to try to build GNU Make themselves. This thread is like the 4th result in Google if I search for the thread's title, and everything else is completely useless.

[Creature]

I've experienced that a couple of times too, it's very annoying when it happens. When you run --help you expect to get the options that are possible, not just the default options. Usually, when there isn't anything that allows you to view a list, all you can do is either try to figure out a help command (e.g. some makefiles can display options when you use certain targets I believe). If that doesn't work, I guess all that's left is either try to find the documentation, and if there isn't any, open up the files shipped with GNU Make (which can be very tedious since some of the files are immensily long and searching them is annoying). Sometimes the options are packed pretty much together though, and you might have luck trying to search in the files for configure options you already know to find these "groups".

[Solar]

Open configure.in and browse through all occurrences of AC_ARG_*. That usually gives you a pretty good overview of what's possible.

[Firestryke31]

I did. Post #3's edit. It's working so far, with no visible dependency on either libintl-whatever.dll that MSYS's 'official' one has or the other one dumped in by GCC 4.4.0.

I'm still having trouble making GCC 4.5.0 due to it's decision to use DOS style paths in it's makefiles/config scripts but I'll just boot into Linux and cross-compile that PoS. I pretty much know how to do that by heart. Yay building GCC twice.