[TUHS] "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

[ron minnich]

https://archive.org/details/login_jan94/page/n31/mode/2up?q=imake

"I said, in a review I wrote for this newsletter that Software Portability
with imake [Paul DuBois, 1993. Software Portability with imake. O'Reilly &
Associ¬ ates, Inc.] is a fine book: well-written, well-edited, and useful.
Here, I'll argue that it's a fine book about a dreadful idea: imake.
Actually, I've seen enough imake-like make front-ends to suspect that such
things are as common as peas. I don't like any of them. Why?"



On Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 9:21 AM Alan Coopersmith <
alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:

> On 3/18/25 09:03, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> > ron minnich wrote in
> >   <CAP6exY+4hfjs0rfMA-pSRYj0Qi5SiXM+qqyCyJdErws9HYHpwQ at mail.gmail.com>:
> >
> >   |I know it's out there, I just can't find it.
>
> >    name=xorg-imake
> >    version=1.0.10
> >    release=1
> >    source=(
> https://www.x.org/releases/individual/util/imake-$version.tar.xz)
>
> Yes, we still maintain Imake upstream at X.Org, but every new release for
> years
> has had notes like:
>
>    The X Window System used imake extensively up through the X11R6.9
> release,
>    for both full builds within the source tree and external software.
>    X moved off of imake for its build system in 2005 for X11R7.0 and later
>    releases, but still provides imake for building existing external
> software
>    programs that have not yet converted, though we are not actively
> maintaining
>    it for new OS or platform releases.
>
>    Anyone shipping software still using imake to build should be working on
>    moving to something that is still adding support for new platforms and
>    runtimes.
>
> as seen in
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2024-January/061524.html
>
> We don't even use Imake to build itself - since 2005 it has been built with
> autoconf & automake, and this year I merged the changes to let it build
> with
> meson instead:
>     https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/util/imake/-/merge_requests/13
>
> But I don't have a copy of the paper referred to in the first email in this
> thread, and both the sites we link to for Imake information from the Imake
> README seem to have died now:
>
>      https://www.snake.net/software/imake-stuff/
>      https://www.kitebird.com/imake-book/
>
> --
>          -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
>           Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris
>
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