Re: [9fans] Barrelfish

[Dave Eckhardt <davide+p9@cs.cmu.edu>]

>> See cons/scons.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion.  In this project someone actually
> made that same suggestion, but rudely?basically insulting the
> very thought that someone would be stupid enough to base a
> build system for commercial software on make.

The non-Plan 9 world suffers from several structural problems
which have undermined make's original model.  A big one is
file systems with routine large clock skew, and another is the
N-layers-deep (for large N) nature (build libraries to build
tools to build libraries to build applications) which is
considered reasonable, or at least unavoidable.

Combining that last one with the absence of namespaces makes
the problem truly painful in ways which (I think) stretch it
outside of the make model.  It's possible to "make it work"
with enough thrust, but I think people who have done that once
and then tried cons/scons think the change is worthwhile.  Cons
was written by somebody who was in charge of "strap enough thrust
onto make" twice and he wrote it to address exactly the problems
he saw so he could skip past that part at startup #3.

> Am I expected to complicate my project management tool with
> python, just to get it to rebuild if a file dependency's date
> changes at all, rather than only if the file dependency has
> a newer date?

Cons and scons get you more than that.  Few make systems notice
when your compiler has changed out from under you.  With gcc's
drift rate that could be particularly valuable :-)

> What's wrong with a little language these days?

Personally I don't find make as typically "augmented" by m4 plus
3,000-line shell scripts to qualify as a "little language".  But
YMMV and this isn't a make-vs-cons list.

Dave Eckhardt