Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

We should just write Makefiles. If you want to be really nice, have it source a Makefile.inc file and keep all the user configuration stuff in there. If you want to be really really nice, consider accepting pull requests for .inc files that work with popular distros.

View on HN

I just write (gnu) makefiles for my projects these days and invoke pkg-config to detect libraries and features. It's easy for me because I've been doing it this way for decades. But there are way too many footguns for me to recommend it to new developers (although I'm not sure what I would recommend instead either).

I think Make is exactly what you want, and I do recommend it to everybody, since the default alternative is usually something heinous like CMake which isn't really an improvement. You want the bit of logic to create a "build system" out of Make abstracted into a library, and then it's perfect. I use this: https://github.com/dkogan/mrbuild/ but there're many other ways to do it

What I want is a DAG, but with better syntax than make.

The closest I have come to ideal is a custom ninja build file generator, which is pretty simple. It's been easier for other people to maintain than make or even rake.

Makefiles are too brittle and allow all kinds of user errors. Targets with too many dependencies, too few dependencies, race conditions. The default doesn’t even handle transitive #include dependencies without you yourself plugging in complex .d-file generation using the compiler.

Are they though? The "complex .d-file generation" is "gcc -MMD" and a "-include *.d" at the end of the Makefile. You specify the dependencies, and it's on you to get those right, as it is in every other build system. I've never seen a race condition.

The problem with Make, is that it works just well-enough to allow people to sorta get it to work without requiring them to learn how to actually use the thing. Then they don't read the manual, and complain that Make doesn't, in fact, work.

Nice job, you just hit a footgun: try to remove any .h file (and the corresponding #include directive) and see your build just break. You need an empty `%.h: ;` directive for make to ignore missing .h files.

Make is full of this stuff and as a distro packager having to deal with each's individual quirks is prone to drive one insane. Please consider using meson, at least.

I do not believe that adding such rules for ignoring files is wise.

I prefer to just run "make clean" after I delete, rename or move source files.

With a properly written "Makefile" nothing else needs to be done and there will never be a broken build. With a properly written "Makefile" nothing has to be done when adding source files.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com