[PATCH modular] Perform arbitrary git or make commands.

[Trevor Woerner]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Gaetan Nadon <memsize at videotron.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-09-24 at 00:15 -0400, Trevor Woerner wrote:
> Removal of existing options should be discussed separately.
> Providing a generic way of performing tasks (the --cmd) does not mean
> making it harder to perform common tasks.

I'm not trying to make it harder to perform the common tasks, it just
cleans up the code considerably.

Before I started looking into the build script, if the user specified
the "--clean" option the script would (for every repository) perform:

1. configure
2. make
3. make clean
4. make install (which essentially performs a "make" again followed by
an install)

Also, if the user specified the "-d" and the "--clean" options the script would:

1. configure
2. make
3. make clean
4. make distcheck
5. make install

I think it's crazy that the script chooses the order in which the
commands get run.

> Not everyone knows automake in details, much less functions like "dist" and
> "distcheck".

If a user doesn't know enough to know what "make distcheck" is, then
there's no way having a "-d : run make distcheck in addition to
others" option is going to make it any clearer to them :-)

Leaving that code and those options in is almost pointless, it would
be less work to just add the couple more make targets which are
missing rather than implementing a generic infrastructure to run any
arbitrary make command. If a user doesn't know what they're doing
chances are they want "make install", which is the default. If they
know enough to know they want to run "make distcheck" they would know
enough to be able to supply it on the commandline. Having a "-d"
option so the script will:

1. configure
2. make
3. make distcheck
4. make install

is not efficient.