From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <406D7906.3030701@swtch.com> From: Russ Cox User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031221 Thunderbird/0.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] acme, rio workalike available in plan 9 ports References: , <406C1811.5030306@swtch.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 09:30:30 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4f0936a0-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > i would conjecture that we have not one, but two ''mk''. > one from mk-20040301.tgz that is of interest to a unix user that wants > a new ''make'', but is not interested in plan9. this mk does not need > to use ''rc''. these are the same mk, built from the same sources. > the other ''mk'' is the one in plan9-20040321.tar.gz. this mk will be > used by someone interested in plan9. i belive that this mk should use > rc. if rc is not stable enough it should be made stable enough. in an ideal world, where there is more time for such things. it is slowly becoming stable enough. there is some funniness with process groups and backgrounded processes and interrupt notes that i have yet to work out, but otherwise it is now fine. > since it is never a good idea to have different commands with the same > name (provided we have the same context. in this case unix) i suggest > that one of the two mk are renamed. the one to rename, imho, is the > one that uses sh. possible names would be: smk, umk (or mks, mku). it's the same tool, just using a different shell. renaming it seems quite weird. should it read umkfile too? the last thing we need is for mk to bifurcate into odd variants just like make has. there is historical precedent for mk on unix using sh. i'm not claiming it should, just that it's not obviously wrong. there are non-plan 9 users who use mk on unix and expect it to use sh. telling them that all of a sudden they have to rename their mkfiles and start typing umk is odd. i have some ideas about how to solve the problem without splitting mk, but at the moment it's not very high on my list. the number of recipes i write that aren't simultaneously valid rc and valid sh is very small. russ