Why Use Make
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Why Use Make
1–10 of 248 posts
Re: Why Use Make
#2I agree Make is great at what it does but too many people really abuse their makefiles and don't use dependency management correctly. I suggest taking a look at
http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Projects-Make-Nutshell-Handbo...
Really well written book. You don't have to agree with everything but its a great look at some of the better ways of using Make.
Re: Why Use Make
#3Using make gets quickly really ugly. I wrote many Makefiles in my life and if you have to try to stick to GNU Make. At least it provides some basic functionality. But even that gets nasty quite soon when you need a simple thing like conditions with "and" or "or". If you have to write portable Makefiles ... well fsck.
http://www.conifersystems.com/whitepapers/gnu-make/
There were recent discussions about adding GNU Guile to GNU Make. I think this is a brilliant idea. Not only would a major GNU project not only use Guile. But it would make writing Makefiles much more enjoyable because you have a real programming language at hand.
Re: Why Use Make
#4My problem with make for data pipelines is that a lot if decisions have to be content based instead of timestamp based. Multiple platforms is also an issue, I usually don't bother installing the whole Cygwin just for gnu make. I end up with custom python scripts which may be more verbose but more flexible and almost always cross-platform.
Re: Why Use Make
#5You should use CMake.
Re: Why Use Make
#6This article isn't so much "Why Use Make" as it is "Use a Build System". It even says so in the sidebar.
Re: Why Use Make
#7This article isn't so much "Why Use Make" as it is "Use a Build System". It even says so in the sidebar.
Yep! I wrote about Make because it's what I use and it's the most ubiquitous. But aside from the section on syntax, the post applies to nearly any build system. (And as another poster mentioned, other build systems might offer advantages over GNU Make, such as using content hashes instead of modification times, or more elegant syntax.)
Re: Why Use Make
#8My problem with make for data pipelines is that a lot if decisions have to be content based instead of timestamp based. Multiple platforms is also an issue, I usually don't bother installing the whole Cygwin just for gnu make. I end up with custom python scripts which may be more verbose but more flexible and almost always cross-platform.
Have you tried Waf? http://code.google.com/p/waf/ Seems like it might be a good fit.
Re: Why Use Make
#9Using make gets quickly really ugly. I wrote many Makefiles in my life and if you have to try to stick to GNU Make. At least it provides some basic functionality. But even that gets nasty quite soon when you need a simple thing like conditions with "and" or "or". If you have to write portable Makefiles ... well fsck. http://www.conifersystems.com/whitepapers/gnu-make/ There were recent discussions about adding GNU Gu…
Personally, I don't want a programming language in my makefiles. Unless working in a very codified environment (Java and Maven, for example), I think it is vital to keep your build system as simple as you can. If I absolutely need nontrivial logic in my makefile, I would much, much rather be forced to call out to a script file (because it encourages not doing that).
And if you insist on parking a programming language into it, it should probably be something with a reasonable amount of existing knowledge and users. I like Scheme, but unless the project was written in a Lisp I'd seriously question the judgment of anybody whacking Scheme into a build file multiple people had to work with and understand.
Re: Why Use Make
#10Drake was just released, it's a make replacement specifically for data processing and seems to have some nice features.
http://blog.factual.com/introducing-drake-a-kind-of-make-for...