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> The key to understanding the benefit is the power of having done this in a standard, widely used way which is supported by many tools, used by an increasing f
by inimino 6y ago
> The key to understanding the benefit is the power of having done this in a standard, widely used way which is supported by many tools, used by an increasing fraction of projects, and which makes knowledge and training broadly portable.
You're talking about Makefiles here circa 25 years ago, right?
Makefiles have to work, and /bin/sh is still there last I checked on my machine. The problem with the broadly portable knowledge and training is that many people seem to think "don't bother with all that, just use docker" is an acceptable answer and "best practice" is not to learn Unix because it's not new and shiny.
- acdha 6y agoSaying makefiles solve that is like saying screws solved construction. They partially address only one of the concerns I mentioned, doing nothing for the others, and as the numerous tools in that space (automake, cmake, etc.) show they’re hardly a complete solution even for just the challenge of building things.
- saagarjha 6y ago> Makefiles have to work And yet I get GNU Makefiles all the time that don't work when I type "make" at my computer, since they use things that aren't compatible with my version of Make. It's clearly more of a problem than you think it is.