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

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2013-08-10 20:35, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Although it took longer than I expected to get around to it, I'm
> working on a release-generator tool for DMD. I'm finding that a very
> significant amount of the effort involved (much more than I expected)
> is discovering and dealing with all the fun little differences between
> the posix and win32 makefiles (and now we have some win64 makefiles as
> well).
>
> Efforts can be made to decrease these differences, but simply
> having them separate makefiles in the first place (let alone using
> completely different "make"s: GNU make vs DM make) is a natural
> invitation for divergence.
>
> No disrespect intended to Digital Mars Make, but since GNU make appears
> to be more feature-rich, have wider overall adoption, and is freely
> available on Windows as a pre-built binary
> <http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/make.htm>: Would it be
> acceptable to use gmake as *the* make for DMD? Ie, either convert the
> windows makefiles to gmake, or expand the posix makefiles to support
> windows?
>
> I'd be willing to give it a shot myself, and I could trivially
> write a small batch utility to download Win gmake and put it on the
> current PATH, so that nobody has to go downloading/installing it
> manually. I would do this *after* finishing the release-generator tool,
> but afterwords it would allow the tool's implantation to be greatly
> simplified.
>
> Is this something that would be acceptable, or does building DMD for
> Windows need to stay as DM make?

This might not be entirely related to the DMD makefiles but with the 
druntime and Phobos makefiles I really hate that if I need to add a new 
module I need to repeat the name several times. So whatever happens to 
the makefiles, I would prefer that the files that should be compiled 
shouldn't have to be mentioned at all (or at most once). I just compile 
everything in a directory with the correct extensions.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg