[ back to automake for this one ] >>>>> "Tom" == Tom Lord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Tom> Also in defence of the `sh + make' approach: Tom> GNU make can do lots of useful globbing and set manipulation of file Tom> lists. Tom> If you do things right, your Makefiles don't need to contain Tom> specific filenames at all, and you don't need to edit any Tom> Makefiles as you add, delete, or rename files -- you just move Tom> things around more or less freely, and the build-process catches Tom> up more or less automatically. Long-time automake readers already know I'm strongly against this sort of structuring. This yields Makefiles which are fragile and undependable. For instance, if you create a temporary file with a "source-like" name in the source tree, then the build fails. I could add globbing to automake. I've always resisted it for the reasons above. (There was a brief time where I vacillated, if you read the archives fully. But that era is past.) Tom> I'm therefore not sure it's a really high priority to bother: GNU Tom> make, for example, seems like a quite tractable little program in Tom> an implementation that's well suited to make run really fast (and Tom> that can be compiled in a very minimal environment). All implementations of make, including GNU make, are missing features that are helpful when scaling up to larger builds. They are also missing features which help dependability and reproducibility of builds. In some cases, like using timestamps instead of signatures, this change is impossible to implement in make -- switching to signatures would break every Makefile that uses a stamp file. For this and other reasons I think that make must go. Tom