Comment on Eric S. Raymond / autodafe · Tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of autotools.

• Bogasse@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve always conjectured that good Makefiles existed but never seen one (or only for tiny projects). The core semantic of Makefiles is clear and straight to the point, I think the issue is in all the magic that was added to that to spare a few lines.

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  • PsychedSy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Perl? I had fun compiling perl from source back in the day.

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  • 7heo@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    IMHO the issue is two folds:

    1. The makefile were never supposed to do more than determine which build tools to call for a given target. Meaning that in very many cases, makefile are abused to do way too much. I’d argue that you should try to keep your make targets only one line long. Anything bigger and you’re likely doing it wrong.
    2. It is really challenging to write portable makefiles. There’s BSD make and GNU make, and then there are different tools on different systems. Different dependencies. Different libs. Etc. Not easy.

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• flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Why compile to a Makefile? You’d end up with automake gunk all over again. Just use cmake or so, where the declarative language replaces the Makefile entirely

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  • Corngood@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    cmake compiles to makefiles as well (it just also supports some other backends). I’m not sure why that matters though. In both cases the makefile is generated.

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    • addie@feddit.uk ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not that I’m the biggest fan of CMake’s syntax, but they are fairly concise and standardised. The XZ backdoor hid in amongst thousands of lines of autotools jank that very few people would be able to audit. A short CMakeList that generates a Makefile is a much harder place to hide something nefarious.

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      • Corngood@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        There’s actually not that much autotools jank, really. There’s configure.ac and a few Makefile.am. The CMakeLists.txt in the root is bigger than any of those files.

        There’s also some stuff from autotools archive in m4/. IMO that’s a bad practice and we should instead be referencing them as a build dependencies.

        I’m not convinced this backdoor would have been significantly more difficult to hide in the cmake code.

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      • HelloHotel@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Its a good practice to make the auto generated code a part of the .gitignore list. Any language installable on peoples machines can be used to build these makefiles. Ya know a language is on that list? Makefile!

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    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It does? I guess I never looked inside that build directory.

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