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I've heavily relied on GNUMake myself in a commercial project. But when I encounter a software that does require a GNUMake >= a specific version and on top bash

by jlg23 4y ago

I've heavily relied on GNUMake myself in a commercial project. But when I encounter a software that does require a GNUMake >= a specific version and on top bash instead of Posix SH, I must be quite desperate to install this just to build some software. My excuse was that I was building against 80 different target devices (it was j2me development) on some under-powered machines and that there was no budget for cutting down build times by several orders of magnitudes compared to ant. What's the author's excuse?

admax88qqq 4y ago
> GNUMake >= a specific version and on top bash instead of Posix SH It's such a shame that this is the attitude though. We're stuck with a make and shell frozen in time. Why even add new features to make/bash if nobody will run the new versions? Make is cool, but it's stagnated because people don't think we should rely on anything beyond POSIX
- jlg23 4y ago
  My development environment is FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux; I am deploying to non-linux unixes only. 99% of the patches I have to do to build systems are one-liners that explicitly spell out what syntactic sugar the newest feature of gmake/bash supported or that fixes what a linux-only developer considers to be "the standard" (and let's talk real, it's not only "linux-only" anymore, one has to say "this-specific-linux-distro-only"). And that is on top of the fact that it is not about "running the new versions" but actually installing non-standard software.
  - admax88qqq 4y ago
    Sure but do you pull in any other libraries or dependencies in your development that are newer than the 90s? Why must the build system stick to POSIX when your libraries don't?