make
IMHO the killer features of make are:
- specify rules for building a target. rules can have matching wildcards in the inputs and outputs
- only rebuilds when inputs change
but the big problem with make is that make’s syntax is garbage, and also so is a lot of the functionality itself (e.g. how do you do paths with spaces?)
alternatives to make that focus on just running tasks with a DAG structure
- http://gittup.org/tup/
- lua for scripting
- can rules be multiple commands? I don’t see any examples of that
- somehow it can detect if a rule didn’t actually use a dependency that it declared
- I think it uses a fuse mount to do this?
- also it has an inotify monitor option that reruns on changes automatically (neat!)
- https://waf.io
- https://github.com/ruby/rake
- https://code.google.com/archive/p/make-py/
- https://github.com/zwegner/make.py
- probably “dead” but it’s small enough that if it’s feature complete it probably doesn’t matter
- rules style looks like imperative code that builds a declarative DAG state
- https://github.com/cww0614/make.py
- (different than the above
make-py)
- looks to be almost the same literal functionality as make, but with python syntax
- this was written surprisingly recently! (Dec 2020)
- rules are functions annotated with
@rule() (neat!)
- rule dependency can be a function that returns a list of dependencies for a target?
- can use regexes to specify wildcards for rules
VARIABLES = PersistentVariables("variables.json") that looks handy
build systems