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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

Never loved make. First used it in the early nineties and found the syntax obscure and error messages cryptic.

My response to this article would be, if make is so great why did they have to invent 'configure' and 'xmkmf'? And why do people continue to create new build tools every couple of years?

Yeah, I mean I guess it worked, but unreasonably effective? Hardly.

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> why did they have to invent 'configure'

Cross-architecture and linux distro compatibility, mostly.

Err, pedantically, configure was not for cross Linux distro compatibility, but for cross unix compatibility. It existed long before Linux was a sparkle in Linus’s eye.

And even then, it handled even some non unix environments as well.

GNU autoconf was first released a few months before Linux.

Is there some older implementation/standard/practice of ./configure before autoconf?

Autoconf makes it convenient to write configure scripts. Configure scripts existed long before autoconf, but were written piecemeal.

I was waiting for someone to say this. I can't stand make.

> … why do people continue to create new build tools every couple of years?

Seems like a rite[0] of passage to some degree. Perhaps similar to people talking a stab at The Next Actually Correct CMS, and The Next Object System That Doesn’t Suck, or The Next Linux Distro For Smart People.

[0] edit: corrected “right V. rite” per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32442473

(btw, it’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage)

Eh, they solve different problems. Make is too simple to customize your build to deal with system differences- it just builds your code.

i've turned to cmake to do some really weird dependency management for various script calling. It's much more scriptable/friendly than make in its modern form but obviously no python :)

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