Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Anyone know of a "better" 'make' than vanilla System-V's?. Message-ID: Date: 9 Oct 90 20:41:30 GMT References: <1990Oct3.000440.5275@hades.ausonics.oz.au> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 50 Nntp-Posting-Host: odin In-reply-to: greyham@hades.ausonics.oz.au's message of 3 Oct 90 00:04:40 GMT On 3 Oct 90 00:04:40 GMT, greyham@hades.ausonics.oz.au (Greyham Stoney) said: greyham> My company is working on a medium-to-large software project for greyham> which we use standard System-V 'make' [ ... ] greyham> There are some problems with this however, which lead me to ask greyham> if there is anything better we could use; In particular, 'make' greyham> seems to have the following annoying problems & deficencies: greyham> * The Makefile is assumed to reside in the current directory greyham> * Dependancies must be explicitly listed in the Makefile greyham> Are there any make-like systems that conquer these two basic greyham> problems?. There are several better makes around. My favourite ones (they are free and very good) are: cake It is a kind of logic programming make. it is exceptionally flexible and solves both your problems above quite well. Be warned though that I don't know whether it is in active development, and the documentation is fairly obscure (there is a much nicer article in some EUUG proceedings). It is completely different from make. dmake It is fully compatible with make, under active development, and well documented. I find it a bit slow (it is implemented in some funny way, using C as a string processing language), and much less elegant than cake, even if it is far less unfamiliar. You can use dmake to solve both problems above, but the second with less ease than cake. I have been very undecided between the two. Cake is clearly more elegant, but I would want to add a couple of things that I think would make it more efficient. Dmake is clearly more backwards compatible, and it is under active development, and better documented. Another alternative is GNU make; it is somehow similar in cope to dmake, but, as most GNU things, it is more complicated and less structured than dmake. All these makes are available at finer archive sites (there is a large scale example of cake at vgr.brl.mil, for example). -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk