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The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

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Re: The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

#61

Post by ajdlinux »

enriquto wrote: post #7
teddyh wrote: post #2

Make is great, and I wish more people would use it in place of whatever monstrosity is en vogue this week. However, there is one thing which Make absolutely cannot handle, and that is file names with spaces . If you have any risk of encountering these without any possibility of renaming them, you’ll sadly have to give up on using Make; it just won’t work.

I agree, and the solution to this problem is to forbid filenames with spaces. The convenience of make and similar tools is much more important than spaces in filenames. File names with spaces should not be allowed in modern filesystems. When the user types a filename with spaces, the GUI should encode the space as a non-breaking space character, that does not cause havoc in scripts.

You're over 20 years too late to propose this.

Re: The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

#63

Post by [deleted] »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #60
jstrong wrote: post #3

I like make, but I had a lot more luck with just/justfile, which is similar to make conceptually but with less idiosyncratic syntax/execution.

It doesn't look similar to me at all. It's a tool for running commands, while Make is a build system. Make won't always execute all dependencies.

[deleted]

Re: The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

#65

Post by gravypod »

Make has very serious problems with it's design in my opinion. It's builds are not hermetic. There's no way go distribute/include another person's make file. The language it uses is extremely complicated and focuses on being compact instead of easy to understand.

I with we all dropped makefiles and decided on a single build system I'm the bazel-lineage to lean on. The world would be a better place if everything came with BUILD files.

Re: The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

#66

Post by m463 »

kjs3 wrote: post #56
m463 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make is useful and the concept is sound. However, the implementation is dated. Just off the top of my head, it could be object oriented (rules could be subclassed), the language could have more sophisticated statements, it could have debugging, etc

Why is old bad? I can't tell you how often one of my team shows me some clever, non-trivial Python script that I solve in a couple of lines of awk/sed/perl. Or a small makefile. Why in the world would I want an OOP make? What do I need 'more sophisticated' in make statements that wouldn't really mean that I needed to be using a different tool that undoubtedly wasn't solving the problem make solves? OK...debugging cou…

I've used make extensively.

I wish it had a little python in it. After using pathnames in awk/sed/perl I find using os.path in python gets rid of all the special cases due to quoting and escaping. Python has nice lists and dicts and sets too.

For OO, I wish rules were a bit like python classes.

It would be wonderful for say 10 c files compiling one way, and the 11th having a different option. Or overriding a few options everywhere for the debug build.

I also think if rules had some sort of class, maybe the nuts and bolts underneath could be changed. You could be explicit about some things that are very hard with make. For example, what if you could write your own custom "out-of-date" check. Instead of "result must be newer that dependencies", maybe you could do something with checksums or source control or something and say "ok, don't rebuild this, or here is the cached result"

Re: The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

#67

Post by de_watcher »

ur-whale wrote: post #9

Make is great as a dependency resolution engine. For everything else, it is absolutely horrible. What I typically do is use make only for what it is good: as a dependency resolution back-end. All the build logic for my projects is written in Python, in an executable file stored in the project root directory and called "make" (I have "." in my PATH). The Python script, when it runs, generates on the fly a clean, lean,…

This kind of projects always makes me sad: you've got to read and debug through an impenetrable wall of custom python code to understand why the build fails.

Re: The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

#68

Post by de_watcher »

zwegner wrote: post #21
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #6

I rely heavily on makefiles, but the gotchas lurking in make syntax are many and severe: http://www.conifersystems.com/whitepapers/gnu-make/

Note that the author of that paper (a friend of mine) wrote another build system, the dead-simple-but-awesome make.py. I have a mirror/fork of it[0], since it's been unmaintained for a while (but it mostly doesn't need any maintenance). The entire build system is a single Python script that's less than 500 lines of code. Rather than trying to fit complicated rules into Make's arcane syntax, rules are specified with a…

The problem with these python systems is that when it fails you look at python code.

Re: The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile

#70

Post by spc476 »

teddyh wrote: post #2

Make is great, and I wish more people would use it in place of whatever monstrosity is en vogue this week. However, there is one thing which Make absolutely cannot handle, and that is file names with spaces . If you have any risk of encountering these without any possibility of renaming them, you’ll sadly have to give up on using Make; it just won’t work.

A way around that is to convert any spaces in a filename to non-breaking spaces (if you can). That will not only fix problems in Make, but also ease use in the command line.
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