this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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82
Eric S. Raymond / autodafe · Tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of autotools. (gitlab.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Crossposted from [email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago (13 children)

converting an autotools build recipe

Oh yes!

to a bare makefile

Oh no!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (11 children)

Honestly, if the makefile is well written, I will take that any day. Good makefiles are 😙👌.

They are extremely rare, tho...

I guess the solution would be a declarative language that compiles to makefiles. So that people don't have to know the nitty gritty of writing good makefiles, and can just maintain a file of their dependencies and settings...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I've always conjectured that good Makefiles existed but never seen one (or only for tiny projects). The core semantic of Makefiles is clear and straight to the point, I think the issue is in all the magic that was added to that to spare a few lines.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

IMHO the issue is two folds:

  1. The makefile were never supposed to do more than determine which build tools to call (and how) for a given target. Meaning that in very many cases, makefile are abused to do way too much. I'd argue that you should try to keep your make targets only one line long. Anything bigger and you're likely doing it wrong (and ought to move it in a shell script, that gets called from the makefile).
  2. It is really challenging to write portable makefiles. There's BSD make and GNU make, and then there are different tools on different systems. Different dependencies. Different libs. Etc. Not easy.
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