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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

(blog.yossarian.net)
431 points thunderbong | 2 comments | 11 Jan 25 04:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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choeger ◴[11 Jan 25 10:13 UTC] No.42664759[source]▶
Makefiles have an even more interesting issue: They lost their main purpose. In many, many projects that I've seen, they only consist of phony targets. No dependency tracking is used whatsoever.

How many Makefiles are there that just Wrap npm, pip, or some other tool like that? A Makefile is supposed to be the build system, not trigger it.

replies(1): >>42664823 #
1. klysm ◴[11 Jan 25 10:25 UTC] No.42664823[source]▶
Okay but make is a shitty build system. What it does have going for it is you can nearly universally expect it to be already installed or easy to install. That makes it a good way to name commands shorter in a portable way, with some dependencies maybe thrown in.

It’s used for the same reason we write shell scripts

replies(1): >>42667805 #
2. mdaniel ◴[11 Jan 25 18:19 UTC] No.42667805[source]▶
> It’s used for the same reason we write shell scripts

Only worse since it also uses $ for its variables leading to "thing:\n\t env FRED=$$HOME/thing some-command -p $$AWS_PROFILE $(OTHER_THING) -d $$(date +%s)" level of squinting

So for those using it as a task runner from the 60s, without dependency tracking, now it's just laziness over a shell script that has "dependencies" in an imperative and shellcheck-able way