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

[Ron Natalie]

I didn’t much care for it myself (and fortunately, it wasn’t my job to 
maintain the build production).   It at least gave us common tools for 
Windoze and UNIX.


------ Original Message ------
>From "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson at gmail.com>
To tuhs at tuhs.org
Date 3/18/2025 3:09:09 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?

>At 2025-03-18T12:03:48-0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>>  At Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:39:45 +0000, "Ronald Natalie" <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>  Subject: [TUHS] Re: "Imake: an obsolete build tool" -- anybody got this?
>>  >
>>  >     We eventually switched to CMAKE.
>>
>>  Yikes.  That's not what I would call an improvement!
>>
>>  I think CMake is about as anti-Unix (in philosophy) as you can get.
>>
>>  At least Imake had a clear design and simple basic concept, and in its
>>  basic form it could be highly performant.  It was simple tool for using
>>  other tools in an innovative way.  As used by X11 though it was part of
>>  what might best be described as a dog's breakfast, but that's only
>>  really because the X11 macros kind of grew by committee and had an
>>  extraordinary variety of target systems and source code to contend with.
>>
>>  CMake has ended up with what I would consider an even uglier and more
>>  unpalatable dog's breakfast.  It also abuses other tools, requires hours
>>  to compile on otherwise usable platforms, and wastes CPU and memory like
>>  nothing else.
>
>I believe the usual rejoinder here is "worse is better".
>
>My experiences with CMake are not happy ones.
>
>Regards,
>Branden