bfd/docs building on Cygwin

[Jan Beulich]

On 09.02.2021 01:11, Alan Modra wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 01:20:12PM +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> In bba33ab1e0f7 ("Fix build without makeinfo from release
>> binutils tar") uses of "cp -p" were introduced, to work
>> around a build problem (which arguably was easy enough to
>> work around by passing MAKEINFO=true on the make command
>> line, as I've been doing under Cygwin for a long time).
>> The previous Cygwin version I had been using was quite old,
>> so I've noticed the new issue only after recently having
>> installed an up-to-date one.
>>
>> The problem is with "cp -p" trying to preserve ownership:
>> With the sources living on a Samba share I observe this
>> failing with "Permission denied". Looking at the purpose of
>> the copying I wonder why copies are being made in the first
>> place. Would the change below (suitably propagated to
>> Makefile.in of course) be an acceptable alternative?
> 
> Yes, "ln -s" should be OK (and of course $(LN_S) falls back to
> "cp -p" where symbolic links are not supported).
> Patch approved.

Thanks - will test this some more and then commit.

>> (Seeing the not insignificant amount of redundancy here:
>> Isn't the binutils build system implying GNU make anyway,
>> for vpath support? If so, is there a reason all these
>> individual rules couldn't be consolidated into a few
>> pattern rules?)
> 
> I don't see a problem in requiring GNU make to build binutils, but
> that should be formalised by saying so in binutils/README.

Oh, I realize right now GNU make is documented as a requirement
only when wanting to build in a directory distinct from the
source one. Perhaps requiring GNU make uniformly is too
aggressive then? Plus I supposed gdb folks would need to agree
too, as bfd/ is shared between the two?

Jan