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Why Use Make

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Re: Why Use Make

#11

Post by __david__ »

eropple wrote: post #9
fafner wrote: post #3

Using 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 languag…

After using Rake (ruby with some dependency DSLish stuff) on a project for a solid year, I appreciate Make much more. Rake is too powerful and makes it too easy to keep a bunch of complex logic inside the Rakefile. Our project, left unchecked, turned the Rakefile into a pile of spaghetti.

Make, on the other hand, being kind of crufty and inconvenient, encourages moving complex logic out of itself and into external scripts earlier than Rake. On top of that it encourages you to have reasonable interfaces to those scripts so that they fit back into the Makefile gracefully.

So ironically, Make, by being obtuse, ends up encouraging better overall project build structure.

Re: Why Use Make

#12

Post by udp »

fafner wrote: post #3

Using 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…

The stupid thing is that conditions are supported just fine in BSD make, but the syntax is slightly different than GNU make. So you're forced to write for one or the other, and GNU make is more widely used - so makefiles end up being GNU make only, even though they don't require any GNU-specific features.

Re: Why Use Make

#13

Post by wingo »

eropple wrote: post #9
fafner wrote: post #3

Using 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 languag…

You already have a programming language in your makefiles.

http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/#Makefile-functional

Re: Why Use Make

#14

Post by dkhenry »

under2x wrote: post #5

You should use CMake.

CMake generates Makefiles and it really is only good for building software while Make can be used for any number of complex tasks. I agree that if you need a build system use CMake it will make your life easy.

Re: Why Use Make

#15

Post by Peaker »

If your project sports auto-generated code, or any sort of build targets that depend on inputs only known after generation -- Make simply cannot handle this. There are ugly workarounds but they don't work well.

Make is:

* Slow (e.g: when compared with tup[1])

* Very easy to get it wrong (under-specify dependencies), with cryptic bugs (or over-building) as a result. Pretty difficult to get it right (e.g: doing proper #include scanning, especially with the above-mentioned generated code).

* Terrible scripting language (mentioned by many others)

* Lacks useful features of other build systems (e.g: tup, or shake) of useful profile reports and queries about the build process.

It is just an antiquated, poor tool that ought to be replaced by betters that already exist, whenever possible.

[1]: http://gittup.org/tup/

Re: Why Use Make

#16

Post by ahelwer »

mbostock wrote: post #8
mynegation wrote: post #4

My 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.

How does Waf compare to SCons? I'm a big fan of SCons, although it annoyingly does not have transitive dependency resolution for libraries. Waf has this functionality, correct?

Re: Why Use Make

#18

Post by rdtsc »

fafner wrote: post #3

Using 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…

Any thoughts on CMake for portable Makefile generation. It seems a lot projects use that.

Re: Why Use Make

#19

Post by largesse »

Created in 1977, Make has its quirks. But whether you prefer GNU Make or a more recent alternative, consider the benefits of capturing your workflow in a machine-readable format.

Like a programming language?

Re: Why Use Make

#20

Post by zwegner »

fafner wrote: post #3

Using 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…

Here's a very simple but powerful build system by the author of that paper: http://code.google.com/p/make-py/

It's just a single ~400 line python script. The only major feature that's missing IMO is hash-based rebuild detection, which is essential if you're using much auto-generated code.

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