[Libreoffice] [PATCH] Work around a bash-ism in configure.in

[Tor Lillqvist]

> My 'dmake' fu is basically non-existent, so I haven't poked at this seriously yet. [...] a transition is underway to GNU make

Oh, (unfortunately) you have it backwards regarding the complexity;)

dmake is mostly a normal make with few special features. Understanding how things work in the old build mechanism is not that hard, it does not require re-adjusting your perception of what makefiles are and how they look. Basically, it uses plain makefiles, that include a set of common "headers" with makefile snippets. There are relatively normal-looking rules where targets depend on pre-requisites with a  recipe of commands following. Sure, there are nests of .IF/.ELSE/.ENDIF conditionals. Sure, the actual rules are in the "headers" and use variables defined in the outermost directory-specific makefile.mk. But still...

It's the new GNU Make based system that is much harder to understand... because there the makefiles don't look normal at all, as all the actual rules are generated dynamically by eval and call function invocations. Sure, looking at the top level of a makefile for a deliverable in a module you can guess what the stuff means, I am not saying *that* is hard. But understanding how it actually works, and doing changes to that, can be hard.

--tml