On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Nathan Kurz <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hmm, my 2 cents is that it's infinitely simpler to understand a build.xml >> file (or better yet a Maven pom.xml :) -- just my opinion people no >> tomatoes!) than it is to understand makefiles, or better yet, programs that >> generate makefiles on the fly, or that generate other build scripts on the >> fly etc etc. > > I much prefer Make to all alternatives. Lucy is at base a C project, > and Make is the standard for C. Certainly other things can work, but > most anything else causes me about the same amount of alarm as a > project that has only a README.doc in Word format. >
+1. I've worked a lot with ant on the lucene-java project, and it sucks. in fact all build system suck. its just a matter of what 'sucks less' for what you are trying to do. For java, ant sucks less than Make. Especially since there are tools built around it (including ones distributed with ant) for things like junit test integration. I think Make is a better path for a project like Lucy that isn't java-oriented but more of the unix/C mentality. This is because there are tools built around Make (including yes, things like autoconf) for the C environment. For example: since we have been discussing snowball recently, I had to add several new languages to a customized snowball build and i found this to be completely painless with snowball's make build. I don't think we need to have a "build system war" discussion, since its like editors, everyone has their own opinions. But how many C projects do you see using make? Basically all of them.
