Hello!
This post is an announcement releasing makes version 2.0.
makes is a minimal build tool that cleanly separates the user interface
from the core algorithm that actually performs the build. It supports
incremental, parallel builds with dependency resolution.
makes takes on standard input a tab separated values stream of 'build
rules' with the following format: <output> \t <input-1> \t ... -- <build
command>. These TSV build scripts can be generated using a shell script,
python script, a new build UI tool, anything.
The tool has been proven by building jq and sbase with it. It can also
be seen as a generalization of gnu parallel, sabotage jobflow this was
tested by converting a directory tree of flacs to mp3s.
The repo is here: https://github.com/rain-1/makes
and some example uses can be found here:
https://gist.github.com/rain-1/f3434f4b12147d5ef62369e511a184de
Justification for a new build tool: makes improves upon POSIX make and
other build systems like waf, cmake, meson etc. in several ways. Unlike
make it does not require reimplementation of an incompatible version of
shell language. It is also implemented in 1/1000th the amount of code.
Unlike make which tries to do everything and falls short (resulting in
stuff like automake, autoconf, ./configure, etc.), it fulfills the UNIX
philosophy of doing one thing well by separating concerns. By using an
incredible simple TSV input format it gives programmers complete freedom
and power to specify builds using any toolkit they wish, m4, shell,
python.
