Re: [TUHS] Another "make-raking" discussion topic

Lyndon Nerenberg: I really like mk. 8ed was where it first rolled out? I remember reading about it in the 10ed books. It's a joy to use in Plan 9. ====== Later than that. I was around when Andrew wrote mk, so it definitely post-dated the 8/e manual. mk does a number of things better, but to my mind not quite enough to justify carrying it around. Just as I decided long ago (once I'd come out of the ivory hothouse of Murray Hill) that I was best off writing programs that hewed to the ISO C and POSIX interfaces (and later put some work into bringing my private copy of post-V10 nearer to the standards), because that way I didn't have to think much about porting; so I decided eventually that it is better just to use make. As with any other language, of course, it's best to use it in as simple a way as possible. So I don't care much whether it's gmake or pmake or qmake as long as it implements more or less the 7/e core subset without breaking anything. Larry McVoy: I do wish that some simple make had stuffed a scripting language in there. Anything, tcl, lua, even (horrors, can't believe I'm saying this) a little lisp. Or ideally a built in shell compat language. All those backslashes to make shell scripts work get old. ====== This is something mk got right, and it's actually very simple to do: every recipe is a shell script. Not a collection of lines handed one by one to the shell, but a block of text. No backslashes (or extra semicolons) required for tests. Each script is run with sh -e, so by default one failed command will abort the rest, which is usually what one wants; but if you don't want that you just insert set +e (So it's not that I dislike mk. Were it available as an easy add-on package on all modern systems, rather than something I'd have to carry around and compile, I'd be happy to use it.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON