Greetings,
I have used GNU Make for many years on C projects. Over the last 10 or more years, I have been working mainly in Java. There are several build tools that are popular in the Java world such as Ant, Maven, and Gradle.
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. They are easy and work well within a very narrow scope, but as soon as you try to go outside their typical pattern, they become inordinately complex or can't even handle some out-of-pattern situations.
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.
Being frustrated by the difficulty of going outside of the Java build tools scope, I wondered whether it might be possible to enhance certain aspects of GNU Make to better accommodate the needs of a Java environment. I also wonder if this issue had been previously raised and addressed without my knowledge.
Anyway, I thought I would raise the issue and possibly spark an interesting conversation.
Thank you.
Blake McBride