Coq doesn't seem meaningfully harder to build than in the past but maybe I'm just not in touch. It was always the Gtk bits that added issues for me, not Dune or

Coq doesn't seem meaningfully harder to build than in the past but maybe I'm just not in touch. It was always the Gtk bits that added issues for me, not Dune or anything. > which despite all the hate for them are always the most reliable build way. Based on the amount of totally broken Makefiles I find on a regular basis as a package maintainer (logic bugs, recursive make, invalid deps = no parallel builds) suggests to me this is not the case at all. Doesn't even touch on how awful these things are often written, even if they work reliably enough. Insane idioms in the name of one-liners, implicit dependencies on GNU specific features, incredibly inefficient shell pipeline commands, overly large rules that mean many intermediate steps aren't cached, subtly broken rules and invocations based on spaces or non-utf8 chars, etc. I worked on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and the truth is that the Make-based build process was only reliable because a massive amount of effort was spent on it. I suspect it's probably the same with OCaml, and not because Makefiles are special. There are degrees to it all, but they certainly don't have good syntax (too terse), aren't easy to read (batshit insane escape rules that were fixed by Plan 9 mk in 1991), and make expressing many types of dependencies really awkward by design (I want a dependency on an environment variable?) They're just really easy to get started with and you can write something broken that looks like it works zero effort, honestly.