From: Seth Kurtzberg <seth@...>
Date: 2003-03-15T15:42:19+09:00
Subject: Re: The onion truck strikes again ... Announcing rake

That would IMHO be a great improvement over imake, although I'm perhaps not 
objective because I hate unravelling imake macros (or any other macros, for 
that matter).

The basic concepts behind imake are basically sound (very broadly, marrying a 
higher level build specification file with site specific configuration to 
produce the actual build instructions).  However every implementation I've 
seen that uses imake (about half a dozen, including X) has become so complex 
as to be a maintenance headache.  So some careful up front thought is 
indicated.

Having several people code up alternative prototype implementations is great.  
After that, however, we should pause and try to get a consensus on the most 
generally applicable and developer friendly ways to implement such a thing.

On Friday 14 March 2003 11:29 pm, Gennady wrote:
> On Friday, March 14, 2003, at 08:06 PM, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
> > A couple of comments.
> >
> > 1.  I hate having to type Makefile instead of makefile.  make will
> > accept
> > either, so any make replacement should allow the initial lower case
> > letter.
> > Why anyone uses Makefile instead of makefile I've never understood...
>
> The convention is that 'Makefile' is generated and 'makefile' is hand
> written. 'Makefile' take precedence over 'makefile', so if you generate
> 'Makefile' from 'makefile' and run make again, everything works as
> expected.
>
> Actually, we base our build system on imake (quite different from X
> environment, though) and gnumake, so in 'makefile' the code is invoked
> to generate 'Makefile' from 'Imakefile' (via include directive and a
> build rule Imakefile -> Makefile). However recently I started thinking
> about replacing imake with ruby. I like Jim's syntax, however it seems
> to me that better way would be to marry rake and gnumake, where ruby is
> used to generate Makefile from Rakefile. I'll give it a shot next week.
>
> Gennady.

-- 
Seth Kurtzberg
M. I. S. Corp.
480-661-1849
seth@cql.com