Re: [Caml-list] One build system to rule them all?

[Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2014, rixed@happyleptic.org wrote:
> -[ Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 02:21:53PM +0200, Drup ]----
> > >Please, define broken.
> > Pick several:
> > (...)
> > I could go on, but I'm pretty you got the point.
> 
> Yes, the point was that you tried to build things that were not supported (doc,
> dynlink) on architectures the author didn't plan to support, or to do things
> outside of building (installing, deinstalling) and many time it failed.
> 
> I reckon that "make" is a presumptious name that may leads to wrong
> expectations :-)
> 
> Was it hard to fix the makefiles?

We could go a bit further and say that assembly, brainfuck and malbolge
are not proper languages for build system and that only the
implementations are wrong.

Sounds satiric? Maybe a bit bit.
But I regularly hear the same for C and buffer overflows: it's not the
language, it's the code. Not wrong but...

The point is that in any case, if you want to make your makefile from
scratch, you're going to be missing some things. OCamlMakefile is a few
thousands lines; you can be sure that you're going to be missing stuff
in your 30 lines Makefile.
And it is not a packager's role to rewrite build systems for features
(there's already enough to do with bugs).

There's a funny game though (at least I find it funny; people say it
makes me sound bitter): you show a custom build system, I find practical
issues with it. To be honest it's probably not a good thing to start on
the ML.


Also, Drup got things a bit wrong: the build system of the compiler uses
makefiles and it works most of the time. As far as I know, people still
get issues when building in parallel; less than before but it appears to
not be reliable.
The main issues with the compiler build system are: age, size,
duplication between directories and windows/unix.