Have Win DMD use gmake instead of a separate DMMake makefile?

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Mon Aug 12 11:34:42 PDT 2013


On 8/12/2013 11:13 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I'm hanging a general comment here for a lack of a better place.
>
> We're far from being enamored to make and we have no vested interest in keeping
> it. At the same time its place in the dmd foodchain is relatively modest (i.e.
> it's not a big hindrance to most developers) and replacing it with even the
> perfect tool is unlikely to make our lives significantly better. Worse, there
> seems to be no obvious replacement for make - each seems to comes with its own
> issues as you exemplify above for SCons - which further undermines motivation.
>
> Yes, there is duplication across posix.mak and winxx.mak. Inside winxx.mak there
> is yet another level of annoying duplication. But we don't work on those files
> frequently enough for all that to be a large problem. That being said, yes, I
> wish that all got improved. But the margins involved are small enough to make it
> difficult for the solution to become worse than the problem.

Exactly. There's a matter of proportion. We don't need to use a cannon (and all 
the support a cannon needs) to kill a cockroach.

For example: building in a Python dependency just so a user can compile dmd? 
This is seriously out of place, besides a giant WTF telling anyone who wants to 
install dmd on Windows that he has to go find Python and install that, too?


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