Re:I Like Makefiles
by ristos on Saturday September 21, 2024 @02:33AM
(#41607952)
That's the beauty of make and shell, it's follows the UNIX principle of being simple and doing one thing and one thing well. People want it to do many other things, like be a scripting language, a dependency tracker, etc, so they're willing to pull in bloatware. New isn't necessarily better. Autoconf and automake isn't make.
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Re:I Like Makefiles
by trashburger on Saturday September 21, 2024 @02:37AM
(#41607968)
Is this satire? Being a scripting language and tracking dependencies are primary features of shells and Make, respectively.
Not satire, sorry I didn't clarify. They want make to have a builtin scripting language rather than using shell scripts, and a dependency tracking system that more complex and less tooling agnostic rather than leveraging the appropriate tool (like `npm ci`).
None of them are simple, they are chock full of hacks upon hacks, “fixing” their own idiocies, and by extension, none of them are doing their one thing well. Especially bash scripts, they should be left behind..
Can you be more specific what you view as hacks or idiocies? Besides the criticism of .PHONY targets, which I don't think is a hack nor particularly ugly. When I mean shell I'm referring to a family of shell languages that are used run commands, change directories, etc. Fish is a shell, for example. Babashka can be considered to be a shell. It doesn't even need to be those, someone using make could use python or javascript for the scripting part if it works better than a shell language.
Yes, the UNIX principle of being simple and doing one thing and one thing well.
Make does dependency tracking relatively well (for 1976). But if you just want to run some commands, your shell already does that just as well, without any of the caveats that apply to make.