> I am still slightly confused as to why we need a Makefile - since this > seems to ignore one of the nice features of Java compilers - namely that > you can just give it a list of file masks and it will compile anything > that needs recompilation - simple but effective. It also assumes that > people have make on their system which shouldn't be nescessary. > > Can anyone tell me why make is useful for compiling java?
"Make" itself is not very well-suited to Java, but _something_ like it is required, because in any reasonable sized project (including this one), compiling source is only one tiny part of the tasks that need build control. One also has to build documents, distributions, source control/versioning tasks, etc. I personally like Apache's "ant" tool, even though it's fairly new and still in development (though that's actually one thing I like-- its code is small and simple and easy to add features to). It is good at doing portability tasks like converting newlines in files, executing OS-specific tasks, etc., and it does take advantage of Javac's ability to do its own dependency checking. _Some_ build tool is required, because Java simply doesn't offer the needed functionality. -- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
