[PATCH] some cleanup in build scripts

[Qian Yun]

The pamphlet/dvi is long gone.

And the "BASE" variable is empty for almost two decades.

Also "RECURSIVE_TARGETS" related machinery looks like
not needed anymore. (This is not in the patch.)
Can it be removed as well?

- Qian

[Waldek Hebisch]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 07:36:38PM +0800, Qian Yun wrote:
> The pamphlet/dvi is long gone.
>
> And the "BASE" variable is empty for almost two decades.

Let me say that BASE was introduced by Bill Page to handle possible
mismatch between mingw pathname and native Windows pathnames.
AFAIR Bill wrote that some combinations (especially involwing
Windows drive letters) worked that way and did not work in
other ways. Possibly nobody else tried such combinations,
possibly other improvements made this unnecessary. I am not
using Windows so can not say more, except that my normal policy
was to avoid untestable changes, so I just kept this machinery.

Having said this, if nobody uses this functionality I will
not defend it.

> Also "RECURSIVE_TARGETS" related machinery looks like
> not needed anymore. (This is not in the patch.)
> Can it be removed as well?

AFAICS RECURSIVE_TARGETS was intended for specific organization
of source tree, in particular where some aspects are spread out
over multiple directories. We have different organization, so
it is probably not needed.

--
Waldek Hebisch

[Qian Yun]

Now we have better test coverage automatically via CI,
we can be more confident in removing unused build machinery.

(The windows drive letter situation seems to be improved by
a great deal over the years, except the ECL quirk I mentioned
yesterday, which is worked around by relative path.)

I'll do the change after through testing.

- Qian

[Qian Yun]

This attachment removes more unused variables, the unused
recursive target mechanism. I've checked that they are
really not used.

I've tested manually (especially the "clean/distclean" target)
and automatically via CI.

Please give it a review or test.

Further more (I did not include in this patch), I find that

./src/lib/Makenotes.tex
./src/Makenotes.tex
./Makenotes.tex
./confignotes.tex

are seriously outdated, they add very little valuable information
to current build system. (Because current build system have evolved
a long long way.) I believe now is the time to remove them.

- Qian

On 4/28/26 8:15 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

[Waldek Hebisch]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 06:27:04PM +0800, Qian Yun wrote:
> This attachment removes more unused variables, the unused
> recursive target mechanism. I've checked that they are
> really not used.
>
> I've tested manually (especially the "clean/distclean" target)
> and automatically via CI.
>
> Please give it a review or test.

Look OK and works for me.

> Further more (I did not include in this patch), I find that
>
> ./src/lib/Makenotes.tex
> ./src/Makenotes.tex
> ./Makenotes.tex
> ./confignotes.tex
>
> are seriously outdated, they add very little valuable information
> to current build system. (Because current build system have evolved
> a long long way.) I believe now is the time to remove them.

I agree.

--
Waldek Hebisch