Redo from scratch

[pozorvlak]

I think that djb redo will turn out to be the Git of build systems.

Comments

Cool!

[ext_254110]

I wish I could see your talk and have a pint after but I will definitely check out redo.

Re: Cool!

[pozorvlak]

Notes are up now, for what it's worth - they don't add much to the README, but it was helpful for me to produce them :-)

[ciphergoth]

The *right* solution to the portability problem is to abandon the shell and write in a better language, like Python...

[pozorvlak]

Well, yes and no. While Python is preferable to shell for anything remotely complex, it suffers from this problem. Perhaps if Python had an equivalent of Perl's qw// construct...

[pozorvlak]

I imagine that once redo's internal APIs stabilise someone will write Python/Perl/Ruby modules to make writing do-scripts in Real Scripting Languages saner.

[pozorvlak]

There was an excellent thread about just this question on the redo mailing list this morning. Interestingly, it turns out that since git is largely written in shell, the git team have had to do a lot of the work necessary to provide a drop-in POSIX environment on Windows. Hence a possible solution to the portability problem is to just bundle busybox with redo, and have your do-scripts use that by default.

[necaris]

Looking forward to your notes -- I haven't heard much about redo but it sounds fascinating! I too have written a Makefile from scratch, but only for toy projects, and non-trivial Makefiles terrify me...

Don't understand why people "like"/want to rely on shell syntax

[ext_391771]

As a developer that finally has had to learn sh/bash scripting (only recently was able to break free from the Win32 world), I find it ironic that one of the complaints about make is, "It's Yet Another Goddamn Syntax you have to learn, with its own stupid quoting and whitespace rules.", and yet later go on to say, "shell, IMHO, is mostly a good language for this kind of thing

Re: Don't understand why people "like"/want to rely on shell syntax

[pozorvlak]

I agree with you about shell syntax: though I've written shell scripts, my "just rewrite the damn thing in Perl" threshold is deliberately low, and I have to look things up almost every time. But shell is at least better than shell + make, and shell is very good for one thing: running programs, which is something build scripts generally have to do a lot.

I have yet to be convinced on this either way, tbh.

[ext_392118]

I don't think you're right in your analogy with git and the conclusions, because I found scenarios where redo clearly lacks flexibility compared to make. I wrote them down in my blog: http://synflood.at/blog/index.php?/archives/789-Why-djb-redo-wont-be-the-Git-of-build-systems.html

[pozorvlak]

Thank you! Very interesting.