%% Tom Tromey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Tom> If you do things right, your Makefiles don't need to contain Tom> specific filenames at all, and you don't need to edit any Tom> Makefiles as you add, delete, or rename files
tom> Long-time automake readers already know I'm strongly against this tom> sort of structuring. I agree. Explicit lists of files are the way to go. Everywhere I've seen globbing used it's been much more hassle than it was worth. tom> All implementations of make, including GNU make, are missing tom> features that are helpful when scaling up to larger builds. They tom> are also missing features which help dependability and tom> reproducibility of builds. In some cases, like using timestamps tom> instead of signatures, this change is impossible to implement in tom> make -- switching to signatures would break every Makefile that tom> uses a stamp file. I would never argue that make is the world's greatest build tool, or that there aren't many reasons to ditch it, but I don't think using signatures is one of them. It's quite trivial (conceptually) to provide special targets or whatever that allow you to choose an alternative "out-of-dateness" test than the traditional timestamp comparison. I agree that depending on the code it might not be so trivial to implement (in GNU make, for example, the code that determines out-of-dateness is not quite so clean as one might hope--nevertheless it's still quite doable I'm sure). IMO a larger hurdle (from an implementation point of view) is moving from make's current completely stateless existence into the kind of stateful world required by other comparison methods such as signatures. There are lots of "database" issues to examine there. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Find some GNU make tips at: http://www.gnu.org http://make.paulandlesley.org "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
