Re: [CRAZY PROPOSAL] Automake should support only GNU make

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2011-01-17 at 17:28 +0100, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
> When having a source three constructed of several (sub-)
> packages, how does a Beta-Build system looks like? Could there be
> tupfiles including sub-tup-files?
> 
> What influence has the choice of a Beta-Build to the
> maintainability of such a sub package? Can they still be
> orthogonal to each other?

I don't offhand see any reason why a Beta build system couldn't use the
same makefile syntax as make, even GNU make.  It seems plausible that
the parser which creates the DAG, etc. could be kept basically as-is.
However, I think the "walk the DAG", build decision parts of make would
have to be tossed and completely re-done.

You might have to add some new definitions to the makefile (for example
lists of files/directories that should be considered "watched" and ones
that should be omitted).

> How portable can a Beta-Build system be? Isn't it requiring
> specific extentions to watch the file system by some event bus or
> such?

That would be one way, and is certainly the most efficient.  Another
would be to simply stat all the files up-front; that could be done on
any system.  Obviously this is much more time-consuming.  On the other
hand you can avoid a lot of rule matching/searching/etc.

-- 
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