Re: Moving away from make

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 02:53:56PM +0100, Phil Holmes wrote:

> I understand it's been discussed before, but I am wondering whether
> it's worth thinking the unthinkable and considering moving away from
> make.  I know it's been used in loads of projects and is much loved,
> but actually, from a design perspective, it's appalling.

I don't understand why so many people think it is... The Make language
as it stands does have some quirks, but I like the fundamental concept.

But of course that's mostly irrelevant anyways when using a Makefile
generator such as Autotools...

> If I was writing a "make" system from scratch, I would describe
> dependencies in data structures that are viewable and editable, and
> have a separate program that uses those structures to determine which
> files need making.

I'm not sure why you need extra structures for that? For C/C++, gcc can
figure out the dependencies as a side effect of compiling the normal
source code; and this can be done for most other languages as well. Very
few non-trivial programs actually maintain their dependencies by hand
nowadays...

> I've done 5 minutes research and have found SCons.  I've not gone into
> any more depth with that yet.  Does it seem worth looking into this,
> or something else, in more detail?

I don't know about SCons, but at least the often-proposed Cmake is *not*
a Make replacement. It's a Makefile generator, just like Autotools.

Also please consider that the build system is not used only by
developers, but also by distribution packagers, and anyone else building
the software. Projects using Autotools are still by far the most
convenient; anything else means extra effort.

-antrik-