An opinionated approach to GNU Make

Post by eqvinox » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #55

eqvinox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write Makefiles for your own personal use — sure. If you're working in a team with other people, or are publishing things for a broader public to use… no. Especially since things like .ONESHELL don't just flat-out cause errors, but rather introduce subtle and insidious distinctions in behavior.

Ehh. If I'm writing a Makefile, team context or no, it's almost certainly because I don't expect other people to be more familiar with Make than I am. If anything, I would expect ONESHELL to map to how most programmers think Make already works, even though it doesn't. I know I have to go look up the various Make-isms whenever I need to do anything complex. And a Make supergenius, should I ever meet one, surely will l…

  .ONESHELL:

  sometarget: someinput
  ␉BASEDIR=other_expression
  ␉SHELLVAR=complicated_expression
  ␉rm -rf $$BASEDIR/$$SHELLVAR

Post by hedora » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #5

This seems like a lot of work to not just consider ninja, meson, CMake, etc. I fully understand that the simplicity and portability of Make is alluring, but if you are actually using it to build C software it is a catastrophically poor choice and you can spend a ton of time and effort trying to come close to what you can get out of the box on a modern build system. If the tradeoff was that Make was easier to use and…

Post by dataangel » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

throwaway787544 wrote: post #120

dataangel wrote: post #72

Can't believe the number of people s**** on this article who obviously don't have enough experience with build systems or the problems tab and space mixing cause. Quality has really gone down on HN comments in the last few years. Most of these choices are not really subjective. They are the most robust methods that make provides for trying to eliminate errors in your make file. If you think "set -e" isn't a good idea…

No company I have worked for in the past 10 years has used Make at all, other than when I'm using it, and that's because I'm just old and used to it. Developers use build tools designed for their language, Syseng use ci/cd and shell scripts, very large teams standardize on some "modern" overcomplicated monstrosity.

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

ec965 wrote: post #64

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #15

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 unor…

The purpose of a title is both to summarize content and grab the readers attention. It's up the author which one they put for emphasis on. You clicked so it worked, even if you don't like it.

Post by bee_rider » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 6:13 PM UTC

aslilac wrote: post #122

jpollock wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tabs and spaces thing is targeted at teams. At any point, there will be someone editing the makefile with a misconfigured editor. Depending on the team's growth rate, and their desire to use different tools, this happens a lot. Avoiding tab vs spaces or tab width arguments is a good thing for any team to do. :)

Yet this has been settled in Makefiles for a long time: use tabs. OP only seeks to sit on a high horse about how tabs are bad and to divide an ecosystem which is already pretty consistent. I’m so tired of people insisting tabs are evil and that using them somehow makes you “wrong.”