Re: [Caml-list] A Tutorial on GNU Make with OCaml

["Michaël Grünewald" <Michael.Grunewald@laposte.net>]

Hi David,

David Allsopp wrote:

>Michael Grünewald wrote:
>  
>
>>My personal taste goes rather to BSD Make (make in FreeBSD, bsdmake in OS-
>>X and bmake in some other places): I found it much mor eeasy to program,
>>and the FreeBSD build toolchain and ports collection provide a significant
>>amount of Makefile techniques one can draws its inspiration from. I wrote
>>my own macros for my OCaml projects.
>>    
>>
>
>So essentially you dislike make in general (bmake and gmake aren't *that*
>different - though that said on BSD I always use gmake) - simply that on BSD
>there are a large number of pre-written Makefiles and Makefile fragments
>which allow you to produce your Makefiles more quickly.
>  
>
Oh no, not at all, I really love make and the central role it plays in 
my use of a UNIX workstation. Since I have to work on Mac OS-X, Linux 
and Solaris, while I have FreeBSD at home, I had to pay special 
attention to the portability of the macros and reimplemented many 
mechanisms presented in the `standard' BSD Makefiles.  I use them all 
the time, and they usually work like a charm!

The most polished sets are for the production of TeX/LaTeX documents 
(with METAPOST and BIBTeX support) and the production of a web page 
(with sgmlnorm and tidy). The OCaml macros work but some parts really 
need to be rewritten.

You are quite right that bmake and gmake are not that different. When I 
switched from GNU Make to BMake, I found it easy and straightforward to 
program and appreciate the lot of meaningful examples I could study to 
learn the proper use of the program. It does not need to mean that such 
examples do not exist for gmake, just that I did not found them in times 
of need.

Best Regards,
Michael