Ask HN: Am I a bad person for not using Make?
13 by travisgriggs | 15 comments on Hacker News.
I maintain a small handful of embedded C projects. Originally, I copied a Makefile from somewhere and did the standard thing with it. For basic dependency tracking, it's pretty straightforward of course. But every time I needed to do something "different" I had to go chase down how to do that (autogenerating a versions.c file for example). I don't remember at what point I snapped, but on one of these sojourns, I thought to myself: "The basic problem I'm solving here is driving gcc compile/link phases. I know how that works well. I want to do as little as possible. I know Python really pretty well, and I can generally get it to do anything I want. Why not just write a python script to do this? I'm tired of trying to figure out how to make do one more thing with .phony or whatever. I've got enough languages/systems/frameworks in my head already." So that's what I did. Took an hour or two to write it. It's ~200 lines long. It does fast threaded dependent builds. In addition to compiling, it does various other side related tasks. Peers have taken it and tweaked it multiple times to do interesting things. I just got tired of those Makefiles that evolve and over time, there's only one guy that understands it anymore. It's served us well for years. Am I the only developer to ever take this road less traveled?
13 by travisgriggs | 15 comments on Hacker News.
I maintain a small handful of embedded C projects. Originally, I copied a Makefile from somewhere and did the standard thing with it. For basic dependency tracking, it's pretty straightforward of course. But every time I needed to do something "different" I had to go chase down how to do that (autogenerating a versions.c file for example). I don't remember at what point I snapped, but on one of these sojourns, I thought to myself: "The basic problem I'm solving here is driving gcc compile/link phases. I know how that works well. I want to do as little as possible. I know Python really pretty well, and I can generally get it to do anything I want. Why not just write a python script to do this? I'm tired of trying to figure out how to make do one more thing with .phony or whatever. I've got enough languages/systems/frameworks in my head already." So that's what I did. Took an hour or two to write it. It's ~200 lines long. It does fast threaded dependent builds. In addition to compiling, it does various other side related tasks. Peers have taken it and tweaked it multiple times to do interesting things. I just got tired of those Makefiles that evolve and over time, there's only one guy that understands it anymore. It's served us well for years. Am I the only developer to ever take this road less traveled?
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