Re: [rfc] Antimake

[Sam Varshavchik]

Marko Kreen writes:

> Antimake is my attempt to fix "no good build system" problem -
> GNU Make library, but instead inventing custom conventions,
> it implements Automake syntax.
>
> Example:
>
>   bin_PROGRAMS = hello
>   hello_SOURCES = hello.c
>   include antimake.mk
>
> After writing such Makefile, you can run 'make' immediately,
> no need for ./configure or Makefile rebuild.

Woot.

Did exactly the same thing myself, for my last $dayjob$. It turns out that  
GNU make macros can do pretty much everything that automake does.

I started on 3.80, and it reached the point where the poor, suffering gmake  
was segfaulting on all the rules that were torturing it. Had to update it to  
3.81, to actually get it to work.

For extra credit, it should be possibly to hack this so that you can flip a  
switch and build both a "debug" build (-g for C/C++ code) and a "release"  
build (with -O2) at the same time. I did this by autogenerating two rulesets  
in parallel: something along the lines of one set of rules to build .o from  
C and C++ dot-extensions, and another rule to build .do from C and C++ dot- 
extensions, using the C/C++ build command with the right set of flags.

Something like what libtool rules end up doing to build both static and  
shared libraries from the same set of source files.

This also means two link targets, one to link the debug objects and one to  
link the release objects. Both for binaries and libraries; release binaries  
would link against the release libraries, and debug binaries would link against  
the debug libraries.

So, in the above case, bin_PROGRAMS would expand out and define a target for  
both "hello" and "hello.debug", then write a dependency for each binary on  
the corresponding set of object modules, and the appropriate link command,  
then all the autogenerated rules take over, and build two sets of object  
modules in parallel, from the same list of source files. And with -j,  
everything was churning in parallel.

Those were the good ol' days…

pgpQMZ7SfVoid.pgp
Description: PGP signature