Re: [dev] lightweight build system

From: Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2017 10:36:39 +0200

Hi Alex,

On 23 July 2017 at 09:47, ochern <dexahex_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm new here and I want to ask if somebody is interested in discussing
> a development of lightweight build system based on simple Shell and
> Make. It would be great to hear the opinions from the community and
> may be there would rise a common welth and opportunity to develop
> suckless build system :)

Imho an almost suckless build system already exists: mk[0]+9base.

"Almost" derives from the fact, that 9base or p9p in conjunction with
the popular rc shell is kind of an alien citizen in a regular
Linux/BSD environment, and thus probably not the easiest choice for
gaining straight adoption. Nevertheless, if you dig deeper into all
the problems of GNU vs BSD vs Shitwaris etc. userlands, you will
notice that it becomes a hard task to find a suitable subset in
Makefiles + shell commands that will work almost painfree on most
platforms. sbase+ubase doesn't ease the solution, as they don't nicely
co-exist with GNU or BSD userlands.

In such situations, relying on mk+9base is an excellent choice, as the
limitations of mk, rc and its native userland are well understood --
and still mk+9base are a lot(!) smaller in code size than bash for
instance.

For stali development I considered switching to mk, but concluded it
isn't worth the effort as stali can only be built in a Linux
environment anyways.

To conclude, mk and our just-Makefile based build systems aren't
perfect, but they are extremely suckless in comparison to generated
GNUmakefiles and GNU authell.

Instead on focussing on yet another build system, I would rather
suggest to focus on a better mail archiver or to work on a nice
bugtracker, that fits well into the mlmmj world of things.

[0] http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/mk/mk.pdf

Best regards,
Anselm
Received on Sun Jul 23 2017 - 10:36:39 CEST

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