Make delegates a certain amount of work to the shell and utility programs. This reliance on external programs makes make powerful but makes making portable makefiles more difficult.
It would be cool if GNU make did more of the mundane make tasks as built-in make functions. This would greatly simplify porting (especially to Windows) and probably make Windows make faster. By mundane tasks, I mean things like: file copy/move/install mkdir file removal find files Something like $(mkdir a/b/c) makes the directories and echos what it is doing. Would that be a good idea? The other main thing is the interpretation of make commands by the shell. Perhaps make could have its own "make shell" that comes with make and can be selected via the SHELL variable. In that case, we could use the normal syntax to do mkdir, etc., but these mundane tasks could be shell built-ins. That would be particularly cool. No? Jon. _______________________________________________ Make-w32 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/make-w32
