Re: GNU Make for Java projects

[Henrik Carlqvist]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 05:42:44 -0600
Blake McBride <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have found Make very easy to understand and use.  Given the amount of
> work they do in the background, I have found build tools such as Maven
> and Gradle to be very confusing.

When I some years ago wrote Android apps I found eclipse too buggy to be
usable. Point and click might be nice, but far too often eclipse crashed.

I resorted to editing the source files in emacs and build the Android
projects with gnu Make, just as I was used to with C projects.

> It is my incomplete understanding that certain aspects of Make don't
> lend themselves well to the building of Java projects.  This is what has
> driven the quest for better Java fitting build tools.

Gnu Make is very simple, it uses some command to create something and does
that if something else indicates that it is needed. This simplicity makes
Make very useful for far more things than just compiling programs.

> I wondered whether it might be possible to enhance certain
> aspects of GNU Make to better accommodate the needs of a Java
> environment.

What kind of need would that be? The hardest thing for me migrating from
eclipse to gnu Make was finding out everything that was done below the
sheets by eclipse. In the end it was really just about running different
commands with arguments to generate files.

> Anyway, I thought I would raise the issue and possibly spark an
> interesting conversation.

My Android app projects are today abandoned, but if you want to study my
Makefile to genereate the .apk files from Java code you can download it
as described at http://halttimer.cvs.sourceforge.net/

regards Henrik