> >This is the one outrageous claim you guys keep making
> >that your arrogance won't let you see through. Which
> >make tool is the most popular? Vanilla make? Nmake?
> >or GNU make? From what I can see the answer is GNU
> >make -
>
> agreed.
>
> >because it gives the developer more features
> >and thus more power.
>
> disagree. It is because it is part of GNU tool chain that it
> is popular.
> The complexity is part of GNUs embrace and extend policy -
> they want to add
> features that aren't available in other tools so that people
> will migrate
> to GNUMake and not go back.
I used GNU make because it offers more features.
But I happen to make the greatest use of those features which
allow for modularity.
The greatest addition *ever* to make (and it's not just GNU that
does it) is includes.
The ability to automate dependencies, and store them outside
of the makefile is a huge win for C/C++ projects.
Make doesn't do my dependency generation, I have a shell script
which wraps around gcc to do that, but it is the fact that make
allows me to move that task into a separate tool that allows
make to be more useful.
The other (GNU)make features I use heavily:
* wildcard and foreach, BUT only because make needs to know about
all my files.
I use wildcard as a fileset, and the only reason I need the
foreach is because make wants to know my list of object files
and I only want to specify my source code.
* Some variable manipulations (like +=) but they are mostly a
result of the way make works. I do think that I have the
potential to run into the same requirements in Ant, but I
haven't yet.
So, I agree with Roger, that GNUmake is "good" because it offers
more power, but I happen to think that most of the power is either
* actually better modularity
* or would be better solved with modularity, but make doesn't
offer that option to me.
