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Why Use Make

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Re: Why Use Make

#31

Post by stephth »

largesse wrote: post #19

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?

Exactly what I was thinking. Use a scripting language you're proficient at. This article doesn't make Make look worth the trouble if you don't have a more specific reason to use it. Too much complexity, and quirks like you’ll need to delete the previously-downloaded zip file before running make can easily be avoided with a scripting language.

These days any relatively convoluted task that I may need to do more than once, I cook it in Ruby (and sprinkle some AppleScript/appscript if it involves UI). Languages like Ruby or Python offer a good balance of flexibility and abstraction for this kind of automation.

Re: Why Use Make

#32

Post by minsight »

This is a sloppily phrased call for automation. I can wholeheartedly endorse automation as a goal, but the idea that make can be your go-to tool for this is embarrassing. Make will get you into trouble the moment your task becomes non-trivial. Everyone has their favourite tools and no single tool is best for every job (although grep and find are often your friend).

As I often say in job interviews, I'm lazy. I protect the lazy guy inside of me, because he's the one who cries out "Didn't we do this manually before? Shouldn't we automate it?" He's a good guy to have around.

Re: Why Use Make

#33

Post by dkhenry »

rcfox wrote: post #25
dkhenry wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> use CMake it will make your life easy At the expense of your users. Okay, I know next to nothing about CMake. All I know is that it is extremely frustrating when I get the source to a project that uses CMake and then have to modify the CFLAGS or figure out why it can't find some include file. Of course, the same applies to makefiles generated by automake. Let's just write our makefiles by hand, people.

Thats is the worse idea ever, hand written make files are extremly prone to failure, moreso then CMake files. There is a way to verify that you have all your dependencies and everything is discovered rather then hard coded, but some people really like to hard code things ( CMake and make both let you do this )

The thing CMake gives you is that it will _automatically_ handle almost everything involved with creating correct make files if you tell it to. Why write the same code to discover dependencies and to have external build directories and staging directories when we can do it once and have a computer write it out for us. I see it this way Make files are great and reduce you typing at the computer by a factor of 1000. CMake is also great and reduces your typing over make by a factor of 10 to 20. Things like Go or SBT/Maven are even better and they reduce typing to almost nothing at all ( SBT doesn't require any typing to build most standalone programs )

Re: Why Use Make

#34

Post by NickPollard »

largesse wrote: post #19

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?

Yes. Make is just a DSL for file-based dependency management.

You could certainly write makefiles in another language, but chances are it would be a lot more verbose and probably less portable. Of course there are other make tools apart from Make, so feel free to use whatever you feel is best suited.

Re: Why Use Make

#35

Post by falcolas »

mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

Lots of "Don't do this" without suggesting alternatives doesn't do anyone much good.

If you're on a *nix system, building C/C++ programs (or automating one-off builds like the example), what would you recommend in make's place?

Re: Why Use Make

#36

Post by subleq »

cgrubb wrote: post #22

Most systems I use have GNU make 3.81 installed. GNU make 3.81 added the special target .ONESHELL which makes code like the following possible. I'm not sure if it is a good idea, but it does remove the dependency that make has on shell programming. .ONESHELL: SHELL = /usr/bin/python VAR := lorem ipsum all: @ import re n = 3 print('make variable: $(VAR)') print('local variable n: {}'.format(n)) rx = re.compile('\d+')…

.ONESHELL was actually added in 3.82: http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/make/NEWS?view=annotate&#...

Re: Why Use Make

#37

Post by lmm »

falcolas wrote: post #35
mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

Lots of "Don't do this" without suggesting alternatives doesn't do anyone much good. If you're on a *nix system, building C/C++ programs (or automating one-off builds like the example), what would you recommend in make's place?

CMake

Re: Why Use Make

#38

Post by niggler »

Peaker wrote: post #15

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…

"or any sort of build targets that depend on inputs only known after generation"

Have you tried the gnu make SECONDEXPANSION technique?

Re: Why Use Make

#39

Post by niggler »

mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

"There are many, many way better alternatives to make"

Can you give an example with the ubiquity of make and better expressiveness?

Re: Why Use Make

#40

Post by w3pm »

mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

Use the best tool for the job. Your advice is probably correct for whichever apps you've written in the past, but it's definitely not correct in the general case. Appropriate tools are highly dependent on what you're building. In my area of experience make has been more than adequate (crossplatform games and Erlang servers with rebar + make). Yes the syntax is arcane and ugly but it does a fine job.
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