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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to the GNU Make team.

I still use Make occasionally, but redo (https://github.com/apenwarr/redo) just fits my mind better - it's simple, consistent, doesn't require keeping another language with its dark corners (it's just shell scripts), and works well.

It also solves the bootstrap problem - there's a short script called "do", which always rebuilds everything, all of 177 of non-minified bash script. If you need to distribute anything, you should distribute it with "do" inside - and guarantee that your users can build without relying on an installed package (or a specific version of GNU Make).

p.s: OS/X, Linux and BSD supported. Supposedly, windows through cygwin or busybox - but I've never tried.

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An attitude "It's just a shell script" can be dangerous when you have software that is supposed to be built on multiple platforms. You can never be 100 % sure what your /bin/sh is, be it bash, ash, dash, ksh, zsh or even an ancient Bourne shell.

Thinking like that leads down the same rabbit hole where autoconf/automake disappeared, only using bourne and m4 (!). Just in case you want to compile your code on a decade-old copy of HP-UX. Or I suppose some shiny new distro that is using zsh as /bin/sh.

According to the the redo readme, it takes care of that problem. Alternatively, if a specific shell is required, it can be specified with #!...

To explain why you are being downvoted:

It doesn't take care of the problem, it mitigates it. It tries to find the most POSIX-like shell. You still don't know which shell that will be. And then, even if you did, you are still relying on external programs, which may all work differently than the ones on your box. Writing portable shell scripts is hard.

> "do", which always rebuilds everything,

To rebuild everything with Make, you can use the -B switch:

       -B, --always-make

            Unconditionally make all targets.

It's not doing it as a feature but as a fallback. If you don't install the whole redo program but just include a "do" script it doesn't do dependency tracking so it just rebuilds everything. If you install redo itself it's much smarter and only rebuilds what is needed.

I see. Nice feature.

Inspired by redo, I'm working on a similar project that takes advantage of some of the nicer features of the Inferno OS: sh features like apply, <{}, and quoting rules; /env for shell-variable dependencies; and bind to overlay directories. Its user interface replaces build description files (eg makefiles) with a set of command-line tools to manage build rules and dependencies, an approach I haven't yet seen in other build tools.

https://github.com/catenate/credo

Interesting, I've started a similar kind of program, but wouldn't mind abandoning it for something better. Gonna try it out.

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