Xref: utzoo comp.sources.wanted:2831 comp.lang.c:5790
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!necntc!adelie!ora!tim
From: tim@ora.UUCP (Tim O'Reilly)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Desperately Seeking Makefile Maker
Message-ID: <894@ora.UUCP>
Date: 23 Dec 87 03:04:56 GMT
References: <1034@cpocd2.UUCP> <538@silver.bacs.indiana.edu> <3086@sequent.UUCP>
Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Newton, MA
Lines: 30
Keywords: makefile

In article <3086@sequent.UUCP>, dougs@sequent.UUCP (Doug Schwartz) writes:
> 
> O'Reilly and Associates have a book out called "UNIX Text Processing",
> which is published by Hayden, that has a shell script on page 566 that
> builds a makefile.  Of course, this is oriented toward n/troff tasks,
> but you can modify it for any environment.  This is left as an exercise
> for the reader :-).
> 
> If you fancy yourself as a n/troff hacker or want to know more about
> UNIX text processing, I highly recommend this book.  

While I appreciate the plug for my book, I have to say that
the makefile generator Doug refers to is quite crude.  It is
aimed at people who don't know much about make, and probably
don't want to.  As a result, it takes a minimally
sophisticated, brute-force approach.  

In short, I wouldn't recommend that anyone get the book for 
pointers on how to use make!  For information on
troff, sed and awk, vi or any of the other text
processing utilities, yes...but the treatment of make (and
of shell programming) is mainly aimed at writers, not
programmers.   It is designed to tease people who might not
otherwise be comfortable with programming into "letting the
computer do the dirty work."

-- 
Tim O'Reilly (617) 527-4210
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Publishers of Nutshell Handbooks
981 Chestnut Street, Newton, MA 02164
UUCP:	uunet!ora!tim      ARPA:   tim@ora.uu.net