Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released

Posted May 27, 2013 20:13 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released by drothlis
Parent article: Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released

The weird thing is that there have been plenty of makes. BSDs have a make and most of the proprietary UNIX OSes had a make. However, for some reason they are bad enough that most complex projects refuse to build under anything other than GNU Make. AFAICT to avoid bugs, not so much lack of features.

And we have the rise of more advanced build systems, mostly layered on top of make. Autotools is common but pretty ugly. I think in recent times I have been most impressed with CMake. I find its DSL for describing what to build awkward, but I haven't seen anything better so it's fine for now.

But back to the original topic: GNU userland rules.

Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released

Posted May 27, 2013 21:04 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh, it's lack of features too. A huge number of the most useful GNU Make features aren't available under lesser makes, and reimplementing them is horrifically painful at best, and sometimes impossible. Easier just to rely on a decent make.

Myself, I have trouble imagining how anyone can do anything useful without $(eval ...). Yeah, you *can* use makefile fragments, but this is so painful and unreadable as to defy easy comprehension -- and even that won't work in a make without GNU Make's auto-rereading handling of 'include'. On those, you have to generate the included file, halt, and ask people to please rerun make. Horrible.

(Make's source code is very nice, btw. Easy to add simple features to with only a few minutes' reading. Congratulations are due to Roland and Paul, this is *nice* software. For a Unix make, that is. They'll always be a bit horrible in some ways -- but all the competition is worse, often much worse.)