On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:32 AM, dexen deVries
<dexen.devries@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday 05 of November 2010 18:18:44 Nick LaForge wrote:
> > A honest question: what is the rationale for merging functionality of
> > make and shell into one?
>
> Use your imagination....
To me, make is a tool for generating an acyclic, directed graph of
dependencies between build steps from some explicit and some wildcard rules
-- and then traversing it in a sensible order. How's that for daily use shell?
Why is a shell that can generate acyclic digraphs of dependencies bad? Someone clearly found a use for it at some point or it wouldn't have been done.
I guess one could try to use make as an init system for services in a configuration, but I don't see why not having those features in a shell is better than having those features in a shell.
I do not currently use mash, however, I wonder if it's suitable for a startup mechanism for services just after booting a kernel, to get stuff started in the right order, without lavish attempts at building up those dependencies in a script that can't make acyclic digraphs of dependencies make sense natively.
Perhaps something about `doing a reasonable action for every target file named
on the command line'?
The possibilities are finite!
--
dx