Here's[1] another attempt at converting the Makefile for POSIX
systems to D using reggae[2]. I first tried my hand at writing a
parser for Makefiles using Pegged and machine translating to D. I
learned a lot about parsing and GNU make in the process and also
that:
1. It was about two orders of magnitude more work than I thought
to support the subset of GNU make used by posix.mak
2. The generated D code wasn't exactly pretty
I concluded that worse is better and hand translated all of
posix.mak instead. It isn't as pretty as possible either, but
that's on purpose - since I'll have to mentally apply any further
diffs and hand translate, I tried to make it as close as possible
to the existing Makefile. That way the edits should be obvious.
AFAICT by testing manually, it does everything that the original
Makefile does, including all the different unit test targets and
documentation. Then again, I only tested on Linux. I've been
trying to bend the auto-tester to my will to make sure all
posix.mak systems are still green but I ran into configuration
issues.
I'll carry on maintaining the D description as updates to
posix.mak happen for a year. If we haven't switched by then we
probably never will.
To try it out yourself, get & build/run reggae from dub in this
branch at the root dir of phobos selecting the backend of choice
with `-b <backend>`. I suggest the binary one since one of the
points of this is to remove dependencies from other build
systems. Then run make/ninja/tup/./build with the same targets as
usual. If that doesn't work... open an issue on github.
Destroy!
Atila
[1] https://github.com/atilaneves/phobos/blob/reggae/reggaefile.d
[2] https://github.com/atilaneves/reggae
