I asked myself the same question during the process of porting Firefox's
build to Tup.
The bottom line seems that of course, you can get a perfectly correct
build system with make, *if* you are willing to think about all the
corer cases yourself.
Tup alleviates much of the mental load, and relieves yourself from
working around each of make limitations.
Of course, using .d files can work around dependency detection, but you
need to wire that in make, making it more complex, and any mistake in
the way you implement it leads to potential incorrect builds.
Of course, you can take special care to filter environment variables,
and force make to rebuild when they change (well, I have no idea how,
but writing their content to a file that is a dependency to all the
targets may be a start).
Of course, you can force make to rebuild when the makefile itself
changed, but again you have to clutter your makefiles to do that, and
get an half-backed solution.
Why would you do that by hand (and maintain that by hand) when you can
get it baked-in in your tool.
Just have a look at the kind of makefiles that cmake generates. They
handle most of the above, and are clearly unmaintainable manually.
That would be my not too theoretical argument.
Oh, and tup comes with a monitor, that tracks changes and rebuilds
immediately :-).
Also, all of the above work-arounds have shortcomings that I find
extremely important to consider, but are less convincing to random
end-users.
1/ GNU -MD does not handle missing files. This means that adding a new
header earlier in the includes search path will not be detected. Tup
does that. (and can do that for system headers if asked to).
2/ Depending on Makefiles themselves is a common trick, but it is coarse
grained, as all the targets in a Makefile would need to be rebuilt
whenever one changes (This is more about speed, that you specifically
asked not to consider).
3/ Make will not tell you when you have hidden (a.k.a. undeclared)
dependencies. So you may achieve a correct build definition with Make,
but you will never be certain you do. Why live with uncertainty when it
can be ruled out ?
Now, Tup comes with some constraints due to all the correctness
enforcement. These would be valid reasons not to use it if you build is
so peculiar that it its them.
Time to stop, but I have tons of arguments in stock :-).
-- Layus.
On 20/12/19 01:07, Gerardo Delgadillo wrote:
I'm porting Eclipse C++ project builds (ugly) to something more
reliable. My C++ projects consist of many-many libraries and
executable files. So, as a test, I ported a few to to TUP, and it
works great. However, a co-worker asked, "Why not just use make
instead? It's in all the servers and works great." My reply was:
"Auto-dependency detection and speed." Now, speed is very nice but it
isn't much of an issue in our case. Then, he said that given the right
inputs (.cpp, .h, .d files. etc.), make can deal with dependencies if
used along with GNU -MD flag to generate the 'd' files, etc.
What's your take on this never-ending debate? (I.e. I couldn't
convince him of tup's superiority).
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