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A comment on fabricate: The better "make". Finds dependencies automatically for any language.. Parent comment

Re:fabricate: The better "make". Finds dependencies automati... by silentbicycle on Monday July 27, 2009 @09:48AM (#725814)
Right. Make already knows how to convert .c to .o, all you need to say is

    files.c: defs.h buffer.h command.h
and there are tools such as makedepend (for C and OCaml, off the top of my head) that generate those listings automatically, so you just add this to the Makefile:

    include (autogenerated dependency listing file)
While the mandatory tab in Make syntax is a genuine wart, make has been around long enough that there are several other tools that know how to work with it.

(Now, having the scan for access time changes added as a warning to Make might not be a bad idea. "WARNING: You forgot this dependency")

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Re:fabricate: The better "make". Finds dependencies automati... by garnet7 on Monday July 27, 2009 @10:40AM (#725905)
> make has been around long enough that there are several other tools that know how to work with it.

I'd prefer an improved from-scratch 2nd-generation tool instead of using one that simply wraps around a complicated 1st-gen one that I'd rather not touch.

Make has more warts than just the tab characters. Lots of obscurely-named variables, for starters.

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Re:fabricate: The better "make". Finds dependencies automati... by Bluem00 on Monday July 27, 2009 @11:46AM (#726037)
You might want to check out tup. It uses the dependency tree in a fundamentally different way from make, in order to improve build times. http://gittup.org/tup/
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Re:fabricate: The better "make". Finds dependencies automati... by silentbicycle on Monday July 27, 2009 @02:22PM (#726378)
> [complicated tool ...] Lots of obscurely-named variables, for starters.

Are you talking about make or just GNU make? The $< $* $$@ stuff comes from gmake. Make itself is pretty simple. Here's a good tutorial: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/pmake/

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