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Make provides awesome UX: in most cases you just type "make" and stuff just works, but there is a tradeoff: it's nearly impossible to write a crossplatform make

Make provides awesome UX: in most cases you just type "make" and stuff just works, but there is a tradeoff: it's nearly impossible to write a crossplatform make file. Why you ask? Try copying a file (or directory) from one location to another, sure "cp", but it's -R is different on Linux and macOS! And then comes Windows - there is no good built-in alternative to "cp" as it's hard to make "xcopy" to ignore failures if target file/directory already exist (it tends to ask if you want to overwrite it or not), WSL might fix that in the future, but currently it's quite slow on IO side of things. So, sure given enough time and kung-fu we can write crossplatform make files ... but even if copying one silly file is such PITA .. it's hard to advocate for make in 2017. Probably the wisest solution is just using make to run something more comfortable, for C/C++ it can be cmake, premake, tup, etc. But then again: if I need to add something, like another build step, do I add it to the tool of choice or make? It's a very hard balance to sustain. PS. Copying files specifically is such huge PITA that cmake implements crossplatform copy for you, just run "cmake -E copy $in $out" (can be added as add_custom_command in CMakeLists.txt)

jlebrech 9y ago
maybe projects should have their own ./bin folder for make to use and have those command refer to the right native command. mixing make with a modern scripting language would make this possible.
- lederhosen 9y ago
  GNU Make has built in support for scheme
gkya 9y ago
If you want to write a portable makefile, you use a CP variable which is conditionally set depending on what uname says, e.g. cp -r on GNU Linux and whatever it is on Mac OS. But also, copying files around is a bit out of make's scope, as it is a tool for transforming files. Most standard tools that are used in makefiles (sed, awk, m4, c toolchain) have posix interfaces, and other compilers usually don't have incompatible competing implementations. Even if you want to use a certain implementations features, say GNU features of awk, gawk+GNU coreutils are available for all popular systems, as well as bsdutils. Requiring them is better than when every program require its own build system because they are portable and reusable packages.

jlebrech 9y ago

maybe projects should have their own ./bin folder for make to use and have those command refer to the right native command. mixing make with a modern scripting language would make this possible.

lederhosen 9y ago
GNU Make has built in support for scheme

gkya 9y ago

If you want to write a portable makefile, you use a CP variable which is conditionally set depending on what uname says, e.g. cp -r on GNU Linux and whatever it is on Mac OS. But also, copying files around is a bit out of make's scope, as it is a tool for transforming files. Most standard tools that are used in makefiles (sed, awk, m4, c toolchain) have posix interfaces, and other compilers usually don't have incompatible competing implementations. Even if you want to use a certain implementations features, say GNU features of awk, gawk+GNU coreutils are available for all popular systems, as well as bsdutils. Requiring them is better than when every program require its own build system because they are portable and reusable packages.