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

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 8/12/13 11:06 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> SCons is not perfect, it has many problem. The biggest of which is no
> resource for development.

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.


Andrei