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An opinionated approach to GNU Make

tech.davis-hansson.com

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Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#11

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

kennu wrote: post #6

> .RECIPEPREFIX = > That seems like a terrible idea. You change the basic syntax of the entire Makefile, forcing anybody reading it to get used to your custom indentation, where almost every line starts with an unnecessary >.

Also, the justification seems to be

> And you will never again pull your hair out because some editor swapped a tab for four spaces and made Make do insane things.

Which... I guess that would be annoying, but maybe fix your horribly broken editor rather than mutilating the Makefile?

Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#13

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

blueflow wrote: post #7

This results in a pretty un-portable Makefile. Portability is a desirable feature for a build system, which is supposed to help other people on other systems to build your software.

Given the explicit choice to use GNUisms and promptly overriding the SHELL to explicitly use bash, I'm quite confident that this author is not concerned with portability concerns.

Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#14

Post by bee_rider »

I like parts of it!

The tabs vs spaces thing seems pretty silly to me. If your editor is randomly swapping tabs and spaces, get a better editor. Tab is the default in a makefile and that seems fine. The suggestion to use "> " instead of tab just looks noisier.

The observation about the filesystem is good and hopefully well known. The way to think about makefiles is as a tool for creating files (it is very oriented toward this), not as a general purpose scripting language (it is just a worse version of whatever scripting language you are in it, if you use it this way). I do wonder if he could structure his tests to have them actually generate output files which make could track, and also have his tests track dependencies.

Point taken about the magic variables. Sometimes they can get obscure (although they are pretty easy to look up). IMO one he's missing, though, is the pattern matching % operator. If make isn't generating at least some of your recipes for you, then why not just make a "build.sh" script?

Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#15

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Title: "Your Makefiles are wrong"

Content: A lot of subjective preferences, with the only thing people are probably doing "wrong" being not properly mapping files as inputs and outputs (which could be a correctness problem but is probably either a mere inefficiency or complete non-issue).

If this had been titled, say, "An opinionated approach to writing Makefiles", or perhaps "How to use GNU Make in a completely unorthodox way that I really like", I wouldn't mind it so much.

Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#16

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bee_rider wrote: post #14

I like parts of it! The tabs vs spaces thing seems pretty silly to me. If your editor is randomly swapping tabs and spaces, get a better editor. Tab is the default in a makefile and that seems fine. The suggestion to use "> " instead of tab just looks noisier. The observation about the filesystem is good and hopefully well known. The way to think about makefiles is as a tool for creating files (it is very oriented to…

> Point taken about the magic variables. Sometimes they can get obscure (although they are pretty easy to look up). IMO one he's missing, though, is the pattern matching % operator. If make isn't generating at least some of your recipes for you, then why not just make a "build.sh" script?

Probably a preference for explicit over implicit, just like setting `MAKEFLAGS += --no-builtin-rules`. Of course, promptly using a couple of magic variables because they're "common enough that you quickly learn to recognize what they mean" is... a bit amusing, to me.

Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#17

Post by dataflow »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #10

I hate developers like this. This is the attitude of every weirdo developer I've had to work with who thought they were brilliant instead of just using the stupid tool as it was intended.

Honestly his takes (mostly) aren't wrong or niche (at least not all of them; a few like the tabs thing are debatable). Some of these you only realize once you've wrestled with Make for a while and spent time thinking about the underlying problem, which many don't do. Knowing some of these ahead of time can save quite a bit of a headache. They're worth considering even if you don't follow all of them.

Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#18

Post by cpuguy83 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #10

I hate developers like this. This is the attitude of every weirdo developer I've had to work with who thought they were brilliant instead of just using the stupid tool as it was intended.

That's a strange take on the post. The post only uses built-in functionality. Options exist for a reason, and defaults are _really_ difficult to change in software used by millions of people.

Re: An opinionated approach to GNU Make

#19

Post by bee_rider »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #10

I hate developers like this. This is the attitude of every weirdo developer I've had to work with who thought they were brilliant instead of just using the stupid tool as it was intended.

"Don't use tabs" just seems wrong.

"Use a recent bash" seems like a matter of preference.

"Make is all about files (paraphrasing)" seems a little obvious hopefully, but definitely the way Make is intended to be used.

"Magic variables" eh... I dunno, I guess sometimes they can get obscure but it isn't super hard to look this sort of thing up.

The omission of % seems weird.

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