>|make (or derivatives) is the only logical system to use for the build >|system of code-based projects - the difference between make and a >|shell script is that make only rebuilds files which need to be rebuilt >|(so, for example, if you changed mtxdoc.tex, Dirk's Makefile would >|not rebuild all of the examples from the .mta and .mtb files and if >|you changed just one .mta or .mtb file then it would only rebuild the >|examples which depend on that specific file, not all of them). While >|the difference is irrelevant if you're building a project from scratch >|(i.e. for a deployment/installation script), that's very useful when >|you're actually working on it as you don't have to recompile absolutely >|everything each time you want to see a change.
But this is hardly a "code-based project". It's documentation. A make -B takes only 2 seconds on my system so the performance benefits of make are not significant. >|The only big (Windows) problem with the Makefile is the use of >|ln which, despite proper underlying support in Windows Vista >|onwards is an awkward command because it requires an elevated >|command prompt to use it. make is trivially easy to install - you >|install http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/downlinks/make.php and then >|http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/downlinks/coreutils.php as this gives >|you Windows versions of commands like cp (the equivalent of copy) and rm >|(the equivalent of del), etc. GNU make itself is just one .exe and two >|supporting .dlls (i.e. you do not have to install a monster like Cygwin >|in order to get it). We'll see if Don is willing to do that. It shouldn't be necesary to install utilities that aren't available in MiKTeX or TeXLive just to build documentation. Bob ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
