[illumos-Developer] interesting userland project -- non-trivial

[Joerg Schilling]

"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org> wrote:

> So one of the tasks that someone who doesn't want to work on kernel
> code, but is interested in a significant bit of userland work would be
> to add the parallel/distributed features of dmake into the vanilla make
> sources we have.
>
> We need it to be compatible with Sun dmake, so that we don't have to
> change a zillion lines of Makefile, nor ask other projects to do so.

The code from the sun make program is not very clean. As a result it is hard to 
port. It makes more sense to add the few missing features to smake. 

There is currently one main missing feature: the Sun Syntax:

target :=                MACRO= value

This feature is currently not in smake necause it in principle is a missdesign,
as it introduced an incompatible and missleading syntax for := 

There was however a plan to support:


target ?=                MACRO= value

to smake and to allow to switch smake into a sun make compatible mode via an 
environment variable.

I also planned to add parallel make support to smak ethis year.

BTW: Do not think about using gmake as gmake is full of bugs, implement a non-POSIX 
compliant makefile parser (bas backslash ans whitespace handling) and as gmake 
inly implements toy paralell make support (there is no buffering for the output 
and thus the messages are mixed from different parallel actions.

Jörg

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