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Re: Makefile dependency graphs

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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On Apr 30, 11:30 am, William Ahern <will...@wilbur.25thandClement.com>
wrote:
> Michael Press <rub...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> > In article <nnsr88-v5c....@wilbur.25thandClement.com>,
> >  William Ahern <will...@wilbur.25thandClement.com> wrote:
> > > But I use those tricks less and less as I learn that there's often more to
> > > be gained from simplifying the application source code than complexifying
> > > the build system. Also, I learned that the bottom of the rabbit hole is a
> > > lonely place; few if any of your coworkers will care one iota about a nice
> > > build system. Most of the issues are unknown to them, so they cannot
> > > perceive any of the value you've created in solving them. `make clean &&
> > > make', OTOH, gives them a reason to goof around.
> > I am not sure. Do you advocate holding to the fire
> > the feet of the source code writers? I did a brief
> > stint as a build engineer, and at the end one of
> > the engineers wrote some very complimentary things
> > for my annual review about how he had not realized
> > how much I put into the project. Until then I had
> > everybody fooled lounging about and making irreverent cracks.
>
> The problem I've had with sophisticated build systems is that most
> developers aren't motivated to learn or apply those skills, so inevitably
> all build changes must go through one person. The problem with *that* is
> then it's impossible for one developer to send a feature patch to the next
> developer for testing because it will contain a slew of his personal build
> hacks. But if you're forced to go through the build manager to fixup the
> build patches then it can take excruciating hours or sometimes days to get a
> temporary patch so you can continue working on your own code. And that's
> excluding the revision control work flow craziness; I'm just considering the
> informal back channels. `make clean' can seem stupid and pointless--and it
> is, actually--but the cost is known and foreseeable, which means you can
> plan around it. It should be minimized, but it serves a purpose as a
> threshold for how much investment to make in the build system.
>
> I've come to dislike sophisticated build systems. If I can't take a piece of
> code out of even the most proprietary of products, tweak it a bit, and get
> it to compile on OS X or OpenBSD or a random distribution of Linux (because
> maybe debugging would be easier, for instance), I'm liable to walk off the
> job. (More importantly, vice-versa--integrating a free software component
> into a proprietary product.) It's a waste of my time. The fewer
> dependencies, the quicker sh*t can get done. If the only way to build part
> of a project is to log in to some special virtual machine developer setup
> with a billion random and custom packages, even if it's the eighth wonder of
> the world, I don't want anything to do with it.
>
> So, IMO, someone in charge of a build system has two goals: make his own
> life easier, and make the life of each individual developer easier. And the
> second goal, IMO, includes the ability to readily import components from and
> export to outside the cloistered build environment. I realize those are
> conflicting goals, but I think the answer lies within make(1) territory, and
> not far out in never never land.

For the record, I plan to have my little build system be capable of
generating vcproj files, GNU Make makefiles, and so on.

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Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-25 04:54 -0700
  Re: Makefile portability Leclerc <gordan.sikic.remove@this.inet.hr> - 2011-04-26 08:51 +0200
    Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-26 04:25 -0700
    Re: Makefile portability Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-04-26 16:18 +0100
      Re: Makefile portability William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-26 11:19 -0700
        Re: Makefile portability Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-27 18:53 +0100
          Re: Makefile portability "Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2011-04-27 14:14 -0800
            Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-30 01:07 -0700
              Re: Makefile portability Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-30 13:45 +0100
            Re: Makefile portability Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-30 13:14 +0100
            Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-28 00:02 -0700
              Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-04-28 20:43 +0100
                Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-28 13:57 -0700
                Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 11:18 +0100
                Re: Makefile portability Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-29 20:43 +0100
                Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-04-30 11:38 +0100
              Re: Makefile portability and file utility programs Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-29 20:27 +0100
                Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-29 15:26 -0700
                Re: Makefile portability Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-04-29 23:45 +0100
                Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-04-30 11:26 +0100
      Re: Makefile portability Leclerc <gordan.sikic.remove@this.inet.hr> - 2011-04-27 09:28 +0200
  Re: Makefile portability Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-26 11:28 -0700
    Re: Makefile portability Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-04-26 21:41 +0100
      Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-26 23:17 -0700
        Re: Makefile portability Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-04-27 14:08 +0100
      Re: Makefile portability Leo Havmøller <rtxleh@nospam.nospam> - 2011-04-27 13:15 +0200
        Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-27 05:50 -0700
          Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-04-28 20:36 +0100
            Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-28 14:12 -0700
              Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 11:03 +0100
                Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-29 09:30 -0700
      Re: Makefile portability Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-27 15:08 -0700
        Re: Makefile portability Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-27 15:17 -0700
          Re: Makefile dependency graphs gordonb.d36yw@burditt.org (Gordon Burditt) - 2011-04-30 02:02 -0500
            Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-30 00:36 -0700
          Re: Makefile dependency graphs Michael Press <rubrum@pacbell.net> - 2011-04-30 01:13 -0700
            Re: Makefile dependency graphs William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-30 11:30 -0700
              Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-30 15:44 -0700
              Re: Makefile dependency graphs Michael Press <rubrum@pacbell.net> - 2011-05-03 11:48 -0700
          Re: Makefile dependency graphs Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-30 12:59 +0100
          Re: Makefile dependency graphs Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-29 02:55 +0100
            Re: Makefile dependency graphs William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-28 19:52 -0700
              Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 02:10 -0700
                Re: Makefile dependency graphs Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-04-29 20:59 +0100
                Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 15:21 -0700
                Re: Makefile dependency graphs Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-04-29 20:08 +0100
                Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 15:08 -0700
                Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 16:11 -0700
              Re: Makefile dependency graphs William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-29 16:03 -0700
                Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 16:48 -0700
                Re: Makefile dependency graphs Joshua Maurice <joshuamaurice@gmail.com> - 2011-04-29 16:54 -0700
  Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-04-28 20:33 +0100
    Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-04-28 14:20 -0700
    Re: Makefile portability Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-04-30 18:03 +0100
      Re: Makefile portability William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-30 12:01 -0700
      Re: Makefile portability Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2011-05-01 12:33 +0100
        Re: Makefile portability Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-05-02 03:44 +0100
          Re: Makefile portability William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-05-01 21:27 -0700
          Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-05-02 00:11 -0700
      Re: Makefile portability Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-05-02 13:41 +0100
        Re: Makefile portability Freedom on the Oceans <alex.buell@munted.org.uk> - 2011-05-02 14:36 +0100
          Re: Makefile portability tm <thomas.mertes@gmx.at> - 2011-05-02 08:09 -0700
        Re: Makefile portability Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-05-02 23:49 +0100
          Re: Makefile portability Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-05-03 10:41 +0100
            Re: Makefile portability Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-05-05 08:30 +0100

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