On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 03:04:34PM +0000, Matthew King wrote: > make is a steaming heap of festering hate, with putrid, hate-filled > maggots writhing out of it. > > Everything which has tried to replicate or improve upon it makes it > look attractive and appealing. Like OS X looks right up until the day > you buy a mac.
Indeed. Compare: $ make -f 'This file does not exist' make: This file does not exist: No such file or directory make: *** No rule to make target `This file does not exist'. Stop. $ echo $? 2 $ sed -f 'This file does not exist' sed: couldn't open file This file does not exist: No such file or directory $ echo $? 4 $ awk -f 'This file does not exist' awk: cannot open This file does not exist (No such file or directory) $ echo $? 2 $ scons -f 'This file does not exist' scons: Reading SConscript files ... scons: warning: Ignoring missing SConscript 'This file does not exist' File "/usr/bin/scons", line 161, in <module> scons: done reading SConscript files. scons: Building targets ... scons: `.' is up to date. scons: done building targets. $ echo $? 0 Every other utility that I'm aware of, if you tell it "open this file", will treat it as an error condition if said file does not exist. scons is special. Nicholas Clark
