From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,163994d4f34e92d0 X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Received: by 10.180.75.168 with SMTP id d8mr35719wiw.1.1346980966174; Thu, 06 Sep 2012 18:22:46 -0700 (PDT) Path: q11ni5513255wiw.1!nntp.google.com!feeder3.cambriumusenet.nl!feeder1.cambriumusenet.nl!feed.tweaknews.nl!85.12.40.139.MISMATCH!xlned.com!feeder7.xlned.com!newsfeed10.multikabel.net!multikabel.net!newsfeed20.multikabel.net!border3.nntp.ams.giganews.com!border1.nntp.ams.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsreader4.netcologne.de!news.netcologne.de!news.swapon.de!news.glorb.com!npeer03.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.flashnewsgroups.com-b7.4zTQh5tI3A!not-for-mail From: Stephen Leake Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: General purpose build tools References: <40c4f461-86cf-4b75-9a47-8ec6509d60d4@googlegroups.com> Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 06:49:28 -0400 Message-ID: <85fw74y7rb.fsf@stephe-leake.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.1 (windows-nt) Cancel-Lock: sha1:Ch2/XbMhalE9lgXSge5Ipg/umlI= MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Complaints-To: abuse@flashnewsgroups.com Organization: FlashNewsgroups.com X-Trace: a2c49503f453be029e66104081 X-Received-Bytes: 3772 Content-Type: text/plain Date: 2012-08-30T06:49:28-04:00 List-Id: Ludovic Brenta writes: >>> [1]: http://omake.metaprl.org/index.html >>> [2]: http://makepp.sourceforge.net/ >>> [3]: http://www.scons.org/ >> >> Good set of links, the question is why these are not so widely used in >> comparison to simple make? > > make is anything but simple. > > The reasons why the better tools are not used more widely are the same > as the reasons why the better languages are not used more widely: > > - inertia. > - ignorance. > - lemming mentality. > > Sometimes inertia is a valid reason; it does not always make sense to > rewrite massive makefiles, even when they are recursive and bug-ridden, > because effort is better spent in other areas. One example of this is > GCC. Another aspect of inertia is learning time vs productivity gain. I've spent 20 years learning make, I'd rather not spend time on learning yet another build tool that won't increase my productivity very much; I'd rather spend that time doing something more fun. Looking at the web pages for these, I don't see any significant productivity gains for my projects. It would be nice to automatically generate Latex dependencies, but I don't write that many documents, and the ones I do write are simple enough or long/lived enough to make hand-written dependencies acceptable. On the other hand, it was clear right from the start that Ada offered significant productivity gains over C or C++, so that was well worth the change. > The other reasons apply to new projects. Tool knowledge applies even more to new projects; there are _lots_ of things to learn for a new project, why learn a new build tool unless it is clear it will be worth it? They also appear to be written in less-stable language. For example, the SCONS page says "The 2.x series drops support for all pre-2.4 versions of Python.". When was the last time GNU make said something like that? (I'm guessing never, certainly not since ANSI C came out). OMake is is written in OCaml; according to Wikipedia, there isno standard for that, and it is principally maintained by one company. Hmm. That's NRIA, which (according to Wikipedia) is a French National Institute. I'm not clear if that's better or worse than a for-profit company :(. Makepp is apparently written in Perl; I simply will not go there. I just don't want to worry about my build tool breaking when the underlying language changes. Of course, the main build tool for GNU Ada is gprbuild, which is maintained by one company, and it often breaks/changes from one release to another (not so much recently). That's only ok because I have a support contract. Can I pay for a support contract for OMake, Makepp, or SCONS? There's nothing about that on their home pages. To be fair, I don't have a support contract for make (just 20 years experience :). -- -- Stephe