<rant> D's makefiles... </rant>

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 13 April 2015 at 21:27:47 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Monday, 13 April 2015 at 13:56:17 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> On Mon, 2015-04-13 at 13:12 +0000, Atila Neves via 
>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> I did a `git up` on dmd, druntime and phobos, but phobos 
>>> wouldn't build. Weird, but I had to fork phobos anyway, let 
>>> me do that. Still wouldn't build. I tried `make clean`, can't 
>>> remember exactly what happened but that didn't work either.
>>> 
>>> In the end I `rm -rf`ed dmd and druntime, recloned them, 
>>> rebuilt them and _then_ phobos could build.
>>> 
>>> Feels like when I wrote Makefiles by hand, I'd forgotten it 
>>> could get this bad.
>>
>> Make was a revelation and a revolution, in 1977.  Things have 
>> progressed in
>> the last 37 years. Sadly a large number of C, C++, D, etc. 
>> programmers seem
>> to be convinced that build technology reached a pinnacle in 
>> 1992 and
>> stopped progressing.
>> 
>
> To be fair, I've seen a lot of new build systems, but not a lot 
> of better build system.
>
> I keep coming back to makefile, not because it is good, but 
> because it is not worse than most of the shit I tried, and at 
> least it is available everywhere and you find documentation 
> about it on the net easily for everyone of its obscure corners.

Except it is not, unless you are writing pure POSIX makefiles and 
constraining yourself only to POSIX external commands and their 
respective arguments.

This is exactly why tools like Autoconf came into existence.

--
Paulo