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Why Use Make

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Re: Why Use Make

#71

Post by mmphosis »

gatherknwldg wrote: post #50
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…

"Which one is better depends on the platform you're on" That works against a portable build. That still matters to some of us.

Which one is better depends on the platform you're on.

We are not stuck on any particular platform, we target numerous platforms new and old. Using make, the target may determine which of those wonderful tools in our ever changing (improving, failing and obsoleting) ecosystem does the actual build.

    build:
	xcodebuild -target MyApp -configuration Release clean
	xcodebuild -target MyApp-universal -configuration Release-universal clean
But all I need to do is type make

Re: Why Use Make

#72

Post by ChuckMcM »

I find this a really interesting conversation. On the one hand I've built some really really complicated systems with make (like all of SunOS) and some even more complicated systems with a custom build tool (the google base infrastructure packages) and there are pluses and minuses to both approaches.

If you're building something small, its hard to beat a simple make file. Its easy to write, it allows you to capture dependencies and refactor quickly, and it doesn't interrupt your coding flow.

If you're building something quite large there are some real productivity benefits from building knowledge of what you are building into the build system. And computational build systems (which is to say build systems where the build spec file includes the capability to do local computation) can make retargeting the same build to different environments easier.

Re: Why Use Make

#73

Post by jackalope »

jcromartie wrote: post #57

Everybody seems to be missing the fact that he's not talking about building a big software project. He's talking about scripting a simple workflow around a few files. Make is probably better than anything else for this, because under these circumstances it's so simple it's hard to get it wrong. Something like Rake is obviously better when you need to really program your builds.

I depend on make for recording a workflow history of my projects. There's no point in creating an alias in my ~/.bashrc for an arcane command I'm only going to use once or twice a year to transform, sync or configure a group of files. When I check a project out of version control, it's nice to have a Makefile there to remind me how I accomplished something.

Make allows you to consistently specify actions in a universal way. Typing 'make edit' will open the main file in vim for me in any project. Typing 'make update' will check for available updates on any platform using the appropriate package manager, and 'make upgrade' will download and install them. Typing 'make sync' will transfer my project files to the specified $SERVER as the specified $USER with the appropriate protocol. Typing 'make install' will copy an updated configuration file and restart all of the daemons necessary for it to work. It's a great timesaver. Even when I need to write shell scripts for something too elaborate for make, I tend to create a target that runs the script, instead of trying to remember its name and all of the options.

Re: Why Use Make

#74

Post by rachelbythebay »

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?

Assuming you're building your own code and are willing to arrange things in a compatible manner, then I have a solution to offer. It figures out the dependencies by reading the source code. You can create objects and binaries just by asking it to build a certain target.

I recorded an example of installing and using it here:

http://rachelbythebay.com/jvt/view?bb_install

You can get a copy for experimentation here:

http://rachelbythebay.com/bb/

It isn't for everyone, but only you can know if it'll meet your needs. Hopefully this helps.

Re: Why Use Make

#75

Post by pedrocr »

Like everyone seems to be mentioning this post is really about "you should have automatic builds" and make is just an incidental. redo[1] is another interesting make replacement that keeps most of the good points of make (e.g., simple and shell based), while having a more powerful dependency mechanism. It's even compatible with make itself allowing you to move a part of a recursively built project to redo, while having it call into make for other subcomponents.

What I've done before when doing data-driven blog posts[2][3] was to write the whole analysis end-to-end in ruby, including branching out to R for stats and graphing[4]. I ended up using rake (ruby's make-like tool) to tie everything together with dependency tracking but I could just as well have written a script that would call everything in order. Doing that gives you a way to quickly reproduce results (what's discussed here) but also, together with version management, a way to go back to previous versions and use things like "git bisect" to figure out when you introduced a bug.

[1] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo/

[2] http://pedrocr.pt/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux

[3] http://pedrocr.pt/text/preliminary-results-open-source-evolu...

[4] https://github.com/pedrocr/codecomp

Re: Why Use Make

#76

Post by elteto »

niggler wrote: post #39
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?

For OP's particular use case... bash? More expressive and a standard on pretty much all *nix systems.

Re: Why Use Make

#77

Post by beagle3 »

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…

If you are on a unix system, "redo" (designed by djb and implemented by apenwarr) is excellent. It's refreshingly simple and robust.

And, there's a minimalist version called "do" which is a hundred-or-so lines of shell, that does a complete rebuild (no dependency tracking) - so you can package that with your project, and not have to worry about your users having to install yet another build system.

Other alternatives I'd recommend, with some degree of success:

SCons - cross platform, but slow (every big enough project eventually abandons it)

waf - a unix-only (AFAIK) SCons derivative that's a bit more limited, but much faster

CMake - cross platform, very complete, on par with Make on every level (including ugliness and complexity)

Premake - cross platform, makes IDE file but can also write makefiles for you.

Re: Why Use Make

#78

Post by jhasse »

beagle3 wrote: post #77
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…

If you are on a unix system, "redo" (designed by djb and implemented by apenwarr) is excellent. It's refreshingly simple and robust. And, there's a minimalist version called "do" which is a hundred-or-so lines of shell, that does a complete rebuild (no dependency tracking) - so you can package that with your project, and not have to worry about your users having to install yet another build system. Other alternatives…

waf is cross-platform (Python) https://code.google.com/p/waf/

Re: Why Use Make

#79

Post by jhasse »

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?

Scons: http://scons.org/

Re: Why Use Make

#80

Post by mcartyem »

Inevitably, any build system becomes part of the software. With make this means you are now using a far more inferior language to build software.
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