The World's Most Boring Build System | Hacker News Reader

The World's Most Boring Build System

jezenthomas.com

But wait, your build system is not stupidly tied to a library manager and installer! How are we supposed to live with that? Like, you want us to actually consider what's a necessary dependency for our projects to work? Outrageous!

I've never seen a good way of dealing with nested directories in make. E.g., say you have the following directory layout:

    /foo/a.js
    /foo/b/c.js
    /foo/d/e.js

And you want minified files to be written to:

    /bar/a.js
    /bar/b/c.js
    /bar/d/e.js

I'm not a huge fan of Grunt/Gulp, but doing this is very easy using those tools.

I don't see what's difficult here.

How would you write a Makefile to do this? (So that you could add additional directories without having to modify the Makefile.)

I don't know, I would use wildcards, I guess? And maybe some path substitution.

  SOURCES := $(shell find foo -type f -name '*.js')
  TARGETS := $(patsubst foo/%,bar/%,$(SOURCES))

  .PHONY: all
  all: $(TARGETS)

  bar/%.js: foo/%.js
      mkdir -p $(dir $@)
      minify $< > $@

Ok, fair enough, that’s how far I got when I tried replacing my Gulpfile with a Makefile. However, things become more difficult if the output files have a different extension. E.g. converting jsx files to js files. I didn’t find a way of handling that case that wasn’t way more complex than the corresponding code in Gulp.

Ooh, a tricky one. It may be much more difficult.

  SOURCES := $(shell find foo -type f -name '*.jsx')
  TARGETS := $(patsubst foo/%.jsx,bar/%.js,$(SOURCES))

  .PHONY: all
  all: $(TARGETS)

  bar/%.js: foo/%.jsx
      mkdir -p $(dir $@)
      minify $< > $@

I admit, this is easy enough with 'patsubst' and 'dir'. I had not discovered those, and doing the same job with sed got too messy to be worth the trouble. I haven’t seen example code for this particular pattern before, so thanks, it’s useful. I'll switch over to make now.

I'm glad you like this solution. Indeed, the $(patsubt) function is one of the most useful, along with $(wildcard) and $(foreach).

I can see what are you talking about. You need to use order only dependencies for this: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Prerequis...

How do those help exactly? I believe you, but it's far from obvious, and it arguably makes more sense to use Gulp than to fiddle around with obscure features of GNU Make.

Order-only prerequisites are needed whenever your rules depend on existence of some directories. So directories become make goals too in a sense. Obviously it's way too tedious to write all that by hand.

You can have some sort of high-level js.mk scattered in each directory of your project, then there's a top level Makefile which will include all those js.mk files and expand them from high level definitions to make rules.

Make is good only if you create a sort of framework around for your domain. However the learning curve is way too steep. I would only attempt to use make if Gulp does its job horribly bad.

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