On Thu, 30 Dec 2021 21:17:32 +0100 Mattias Andrée <maand...@kth.se> wrote:
Dear Mattias, > I've actually being thinking of writing a makefile linter. > How interested would people be in such a tool? very interested! Even though, when you implement the logic, you might as well go all the way and offer a make(1) that also offers linting (comparable to mandoc(1)). > The reason to have a linter separate from a make utility itself > is that it would not have to reject non-standard features that > you don't want to implement in make. And I also think it would for > cleaner implementation of both projects. Additionally, I would > suspect that a lot of people would just stay with GNU make because > it's in every distro, so having it as a separate project would > probably give it wider adoption. You wouldn't have to reject non-standard features, but offer printing a warning for undefined behaviour and non-standard extensions while still supporting them to a certain extent, something like: $ snake -l Makefile:1:1: warning: Missing ".POSIX" target. config.mk:2:4: warning: "?=" is a GNU-extension. Makefile:20:34: warning: A prerequisite must not contain a macro. $ Optionally you could also choose to always print warnings and turn them into hard errors with the l-flag. It would be necessary to assess how many extensions are necessary to implement. With sbase/ubase we found out that while GNU-extensions are used, they are not all too widespread and only a small subset of the entire GNU bloat. With Makefiles you don't really need the GNU extensions and they, as usual with GNU extensions, seem to originate from a misunderstanding or caving in to simply wrong usage-patterns (just think of cat -v) by users who probably don't know it better or about the right tools for the job. Anyway, tl;dr: Such a strict POSIX-compliant make would be really awesome! I'm sure many would pick it up. Null program wrote a great post[0] about this topic, indicating that there's no tool out there that is explicit about standard conformance, _especially_ undefined behaviour. With best regards Laslo [0]:https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/08/20/
