[TUHS] Another "make-raking" discussion topic

[norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)]

Lyndon Nerenberg:

  I really like mk.  8ed was where it first rolled out?  I remember
  reading about it in the 10ed books.  It's a joy to use in Plan 9.

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Later than that.  I was around when Andrew wrote mk, so it
definitely post-dated the 8/e manual.

mk does a number of things better, but to my mind not quite
enough to justify carrying it around.  Just as I decided long
ago (once I'd come out of the ivory hothouse of Murray Hill)
that I was best off writing programs that hewed to the ISO C
and POSIX interfaces (and later put some work into bringing
my private copy of post-V10 nearer to the standards), because
that way I didn't have to think much about porting; so I
decided eventually that it is better just to use make.

As with any other language, of course, it's best to use it
in as simple a way as possible.  So I don't care much whether
it's gmake or pmake or qmake as long as it implements more
or less the 7/e core subset without breaking anything.

Larry McVoy:

  I do wish that some simple make had stuffed a scripting language in there.
  Anything, tcl, lua, even (horrors, can't believe I'm saying this) a little
  lisp.  Or ideally a built in shell compat language.  All those backslashes
  to make shell scripts work get old.

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This is something mk got right, and it's actually very simple to do:
every recipe is a shell script.  Not a collection of lines handed
one by one to the shell, but a block of text.  No backslashes (or
extra semicolons) required for tests.  Each script is run with sh -e,
so by default one failed command will abort the rest, which is
usually what one wants; but if you don't want that you just insert
	set +e

(So it's not that I dislike mk.  Were it available as an easy
add-on package on all modern systems, rather than something I'd
have to carry around and compile, I'd be happy to use it.)

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON