Re: [CRAZY PROPOSAL] Automake should support only GNU make

[Steffen Dettmer]

* On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 12:08 AM, Paul Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> * On Fri, 2011-01-14 at 19:57 +0100, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> <http://gittup.org/tup/build_system_rules_and_algorithms.pdf>.
>>
>> No idea whether they are standardized somehow or somewhere.
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg08500.html
> I think some of that discussion was quite illuminating.

Yes, it is interesting reading.

It has quite outstanding features, for example it could tell
where parallelization depedencies are missing or wrong and
probably even /what/ is wrong. As far as I know there are build
systems (ElectricAccelerator) that use such information to fix
such issues (rebuild the file when inputs changed to get the
correct result and show up some warning).

When having a source three constructed of several (sub-)
packages, how does a Beta-Build system looks like? Could there be
tupfiles including sub-tup-files?

What influence has the choice of a Beta-Build to the
maintainability of such a sub package? Can they still be
orthogonal to each other?

How portable can a Beta-Build system be? Isn't it requiring
specific extentions to watch the file system by some event bus or
such?

Is it "simple, stupid"?

What happens when changing files during a build? In the example
with X, X' and Y, will Y ever show up? Wouldn't a Beta Build
include those new changes instantly? (I'm not telling that this
would be a disadvantage).

How does it work? By overloading libc functions? Or does it even
need a kernel module? Access via network file systems such as NFS
works?

I think a good Beta-Build-System could have some portability
mode used when no file system watching works; it could fall-back
to a Alpha-Builder, is this right? Would this require to
distribute some generated depedency database files or so to make
the fall back know needed things which are not in a tupfile?

I wonder whether something like a Beta-Build-System is "the
future" of building or if there are applications/projects or at
least niches where make will persist.

Ohh, this was quite out of topic, but an interesting topic.

oki,

Steffen