[TUHS] Make(1) Historical Behavior (was Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman)

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2023 at 12:01:16AM +0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> > And I think even V7 make supported what you described, as well as implicit rules for compiling .c into a .o or into a binary.
> >
> > Warner Losh
> 
> You're right, I just tried it out.  Been avoiding that pattern for years because I swear some make implementation I used at one point was very unhappy with that, but if V7 does it, then whatever implementation that was is probably not what I want to be using anyway.

For years, I carried around some early version of make source.  Maybe Sys
III make?  It wasn't fancy but it behaved how I understood it should
behave and all the other makes, ESPECIALLY gnu make, were adding features
like crazy and, while cool, they were not portable.

I really like stuff that Just Works (tm) and really early make felt like
that.

I'm a dinosaur, there was a saying at my company "Oh, that was invented
after 1980, Larry won't let you use that" which was mostly correct but
I let you use stuff like mmap().  Also not that portable but oh so useful
when it worked.

--lm