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Zaxo wrote:
The objections to make are mostly avoidable by keeping things simple, only using POSIX features, writing for /bin/sh. Everybody needs make, anyhow, whether they know it or not ;-)

I really, really, really hope that's a bad joke.

This might come as a shock to you but not everybody runs Unix. Even if they did, not all Unixen are the same. Even if they were, not all makes are the same. There's BSD make, GNU make, Solaris make... Even if they were the same, they have bugs and not everyone uses the latest version. Even if they did there's different compilers, different build tools, different file tools, different file systems... oh the incompatibilities just keep coming.

Trust me. I have to deal with all of them. I maintain MakeMaker. And MakeMaker has to work everywhere Perl does. Be glad it does. It would suck if you couldn't install Perl modules on your OS because some unrelated utility is quirky. If working with MakeMaker has taught me one thing its not to be such a bloody Unix snob!

Even if everyone used the same Unix variant on the same hardware with the same linkers, compilers and utilities and there were no bugs, make would still be the problem. It has always been the problem. Not just make but relying on any external build tool. I have learned this after many painful years of trying to clean up MakeMaker. It is impossible. I'm going to let you read why because I've said all this so many times before that I've written a whole talk about it.

Its taken years and 1400+ lines of code to keep MakeMaker running on VMS (about as far from Unix as you can get). I ported Module::Build over in one night and 25 lines.

In reply to Re^2: On packaging modules by Anonymous Monk
in thread On packaging modules by nothingmuch

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