On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 12:37 -0700, Raoul Duke wrote:
>
> [in my limited experience i often want to fall back to imperative
> commands for my build scripts, but i often wonder if that is just a
> lack of my own ability to imagine how to turn it into proper prolog-y
> statements. having said that, i also think that debugging
> goal-directed stuff can be a right blankety-blank nightmare.]
I think build systems should be imperative. You have some
inputs and you want to DO something with them.
Creating outputs is a side-effect.
This is not to say the build rules shouldn't be functional!
After all, the idea of dependencies is to sequence imperative
state transformers in a Monadic way.
What I'm trying to say is: given some file x.c, the aim
is to build it.
Easier to see: we have a file:
lpsrc/flx.pak
Build it! You have no idea what the output is.. it actually
makes a set of files including flxg, the Felix compiler.
But you don't need to know that, since you only use
the bash script 'flx'.
Fact is, what people do is:
wget URL/FILENAME
tar -zxvf FILENAME
cd DIRNAME
./configure
make
That is, the goal is simply to build the thing.. whatever it is.
To do that you invoke the command configure and make .. they DO
something.
--
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net
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