4 ms·

I think Make is also broadly associated with autotools, which surely can't help its public image.

• gkya 10y ago
  Autotools is smoking shit, but the make man page is a few pages and very comprehensive. Also the includable make libs that come with bmake allows many makefiles to be a few or one lines. Also, the best makefile I've ever seen is that of Linux, if someone considers to use make, must see that to convince himself, yes, it is possible to write a comprehensible, cross-platform and editable makefile for a big, deep project with configurables w/o the atrocious madness that is gnu autotools.
  • snuxoll 10y ago
    The concept of autotools is fine for the most part, it's just M4 that has a really bad rap (and rightfully so, it's a huge pain in the butt!). I have a couple toy vala and C++ projects I've written and autotools "just works" without much effort, but when I've needed to do something outside of the standard functionality the need to write M4 macros makes me quickly switch it out for CMake instead.
    • gkya 10y ago
      The problem with autotools is that it is an abstraction over a thing that's already simple and easy at it's heart, resulting in ultimately something more complex than it should've (and would've) been. M4 is nice for processing text, I do use it and like it for that, but for defining dependencies among files and processes to go from source to compiled files, make itself is second to none. Autotools is basically one of the biggest exaggerations in the computers' history. Furthermore, bmake exists and its include files are simply better.