31–40 of 144 posts
Even the slightest attempt at guessing the host system or searching for tools present on a system will quickly convert this into a blog article earnestly begging for deep societal changes and analyses the inevitable marching of time.
I use makefiles a lot as make-do but I must admit the syntax does my head in at times. If anyone has a good resource that teaches makefile progressively, I'd be interested. The main issue I have is that it goes from dead simple to pit of what the hell is happening with various things interacting with each others.
Even the slightest attempt at guessing the host system or searching for tools present on a system will quickly convert this into a blog article earnestly begging for deep societal changes and analyses the inevitable marching of time.
Its a code smell to me when your build system starts to become too complicated and not fit on a screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CMake is a very cool buildsystem that can do a lot, you can use it to run tests, fetch sources, and everything else. The documentation is the only thing that I find quite suboptimal, they could really add examples in there and better explain things. Or at least have list of projects that they believe are using CMake correctly so one can have some guidance. It took me five years before I was comfortable writing CMake…
I had a boss who once quipped that CMake became much easier for him to understand and write once he realized it was just a really shitty version of BASIC with only global variables. (He later added "but two separate namespaces for them" because of the prevalent use of environmental variables as well as CMake-specific variables)
GNU Make is a surprisingly lisplike language. At some point I realized it had an eval function which I could use to metaprogram it. This actually ruined one of my projects, I got so lost trying to create the perfect makefile system that nothing short of a rewrite would fix it. As a side effect, I finally understood what autoconf's purpose was.
If you’re really looking for a tool to collect small steps/script I highly recommend you check out the ‘just’ cli tool. It’s completely replaced our use of Make and the syntax is much easier.
Even the slightest attempt at guessing the host system or searching for tools present on a system will quickly convert this into a blog article earnestly begging for deep societal changes and analyses the inevitable marching of time.
Yeah. Which is why I wouldn't implement that in the first place - I come down hard on the idea that you should ship your dependencies, have them in a standard place or use a third-party resolution system (like every vaugely modern setup does. C#, Python, Ruby, Node, Rust even Java all understand that this is not optional anymore). Its a code smell to me when your build system starts to become too complicated and not…
Makefiles fill that great need for a high-level 'scripting DSL', where you have a lot of different programs (or scripts), with a loose set of dependencies or order of operation, and you want a very simple way to call them, with some very simple logic determining the order, arguments to pass, parallelization, etc. Their ubiquity on all platforms makes it even easier to use them. I much prefer Make to alternatives like…
If you’re really looking for a tool to collect small steps/script I highly recommend you check out the ‘just’ cli tool. It’s completely replaced our use of Make and the syntax is much easier.
I should specifically mention their docs. The docs are easily approachable with plenty of clear and concise examples. I even have a pdf copy of the doc book for quick reference.