Falsehoods programmers believe about build systems

[pozorvlak]

Inspired by Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time, and far, far too much time spent fighting autotools. Thanks to Aaron Crane, totherme and zeecat for their comments on earlier versions.It is accepted by all decent people that Make sucks and needs to die, and that autotools needs to be shot, decapitated, staked

Comments

[anonymous]

What is the point of this?

[anonymous]

disabusement

[pozorvlak]

Sorry that wasn't clear - I've added an explanation to the top of the post.

It's an exercise in self-importance and stupidity.

[anonymous]

This guy will never create a build system. Most of these assumptions are not in fact made, and the ones are made are for pragmatic reasons. I'm thankful for systems like make and cargo, and that I've never had to work with this guy or use any of his software.

Re: It's an exercise in self-importance and stupidity.

[pozorvlak]

I currently have neither plans nor time to create a build system, yes - and I'd be reluctant to do so unless I could come up with a model that solves all the problems listed above! Of the systems I know about, tup and waf look most promising.

Not every build system makes all the assumptions listed above (some are contradictory, so that would be hard), but I've seen every assumption above made at least once, and every system I know about (which is by no means all of the ones that exist; check out Wikipedia's list of build automation software) makes at least one of those assumptions. Some of them are pretty subtle, and only become apparent with painful experience. I've been meaning for years to produce an expanded version of this list, with "systems that make this assumption" and "tools or projects that violate this assumption" entries

Re: It's an exercise in self-importance and stupidity.

[anonymous]

You managed to sound both an idiot and an asshole in not too many words, congratulations.