happy 1.14

[Sven Panne]

Iavor S. Diatchki wrote:
> [...] i wouldn't mind (in fact i would prefer to) reusing the "common" make 
> structure

I'm not sure if the Library Infrastructure Project is ready for prime time, so
I'd suggest to simply re-use the fptools build system. IMHO it's worth a look
at, anyway, and even if you won't use it, at least you know every dirty trick
you can do with GNU make afterwards. :-)

> as long as i know exactly what files i need to distribute with the library

Hmmm, perhaps we should document this somewhere. For a start I'd try anything
autoconf/configure wants, glafp-utils, the mk directories, and of course the
Makefiles, from the fptools toplevel down to your library.

> and the make process does not do unneccessary things. [...]

Well, that's a long-time goal (at least for me) in the fptools build system,
which is currently simply not met. The first small steps have been done by
using autoreconf instead of autoconf, but the feature tests should be moved
to the sub-projects which really rely on them plus the separation of configuration
headers. Note that this would require repeated tests for a big project like
GHC, but the use of configure's cache files would make this very cheap.

In a nutshell: If you know M4 + autoconf by heart, feel free to restructure
things a bit, otherwise you have to live with quite a few useless tests for
a while. I'd really like to do it myself, but my day only has 24 hours...

Cheers,
    S.