Re: [Caml-list] A useful Makefile collection for OCaml projects

[Michael <michipili@gmail.com>]

Francois Berenger wrote:
> Do you know obuild?
> https://github.com/vincenthz/obuild
There is a lot of other systems that can be used to drive the build of
OCaml projects: obuild, ocamlbuild, omake, OMakefile and probably
others. I find it valuable to use a Makefile-based approach, because:

- It is not specific to OCaml, so I can use the same tool to drive the
development cycle of a heterogeneous project. (I can, and I do!)

- It is easy to extend, because it focuses on workflows (targets and
prerequisites are elements of simple workflows).

- It can be tweaked so I can include any custom step I want in my
workflow, because it is based on the UNIX shell.

So for instance, if I want to do plop plop fizz fizz after the build
step, I only need to add

do-build-after: do-plop-plop-fizz-fizz
do-plop-plop-fizz-fizz:
     : Shell commands that plop plop fizz fizz

at the end of the Makefile. And it does not involve a special feature of
the tool but instead, it is just the normal way to do things with make.

Also, as I started in 2005, I selected the BSD flavour of make because
it has a canonical clear, short and to the point documentation (Adam de
Boor's tutorial), an equally good reference (the man page) and has a
large literature corpus (BSD's build systems) I could take inspiration
from. (I actually started with GNU make and switched because its
documentation fails to be so useful as BSD's, despite its length, and
because it is hard to find useful examples is the sea of
automake-generated files.)

Regards,
Michael