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Make itself has a race-condition (bug) built into its design, and its shell language is very ad-hoc. In particular, conditionals in Make are a mystery I'm afrai

Make itself has a race-condition (bug) built into its design, and its shell language is very ad-hoc. In particular, conditionals in Make are a mystery I'm afraid I'll never understand. Each time I end up having to write a normal shell script and call it from Make. You're not necessarily making your life better by switching to Make. My static site generator builds the whole site from scratch every time, no caching of results, no caching bugs. It's instant and I use normal shell scripts, so I don't have to deal with Make's oddities.

smlckz 6y ago
Oh! Let us not forget that Make is basically just a Prolog with (not so) weird syntax. You just need to learn a little bit of logic programming. After that we have our stat(2) :-)
chrismorgan 6y ago
> Make itself has a race-condition (bug) built into its design Could you elucidate? I’m very comfortable with Make, and I can’t think what you might be referring to, unless you mean the way it uses mtimes for freshness, which isn’t a bug for any correct Make script. (And for incorrect Make scripts, there are vastly easier ways of making it do the wrong thing than ones driven by mtime coarseness.)