[illumos-Developer] illumos make

[Alexander Eremin]

Hi, Joerg.

> Alexander Eremin <alexander.r.eremin at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Hi all,
>> I back to the question of whether there should be Illumos get its own Make.
>> It's well known that Sun's Make can't read the GNU Makefiles but
>> it's suitable for building NIS maps, etc.
>> Here for example another differences between Dmake and Gmake:
>> http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=33951#33951
>> FreeBSD has its own Make in base, why not Illumos?

> Background information: There are nearly 7000 Makefiles in ONNV and rewriting
> them as a result from chosing a different make will take more than a year.

> In addition, GNUmake is problematic as it has many deviatons from the POSIX
> standard and the maintenance is not sufficient (bug reports take forever to get
> a fix). The internal code structure makes it hard to maintain the code.

> GNUmake also only has a very basic support for parallel execution, the output
> from parallel command is mixed, making it hard to read and understand the
> messages. 

> FreeBSD uses a make that was derived from the UNIX make but it has some serious
> deviations that are probably not going to be removed as they fear that it could
> affect the compilation os FreeBSD.

> Sun make was originally based on UNIX make when it has been written in 1986. It
> added a lot of features that partially made it into other implementations (e.g.
> GNU make). There are still unique features that are used in ONNV.

> As mentioned before, my smake is close enough to the complete set of features
> in Sun's make. It is highly portable and correctly runs on many more platforms
> than GNU make. Smake mainly misses target groups and conditional macro
> assignements, as well as support for the hidden auto-dependency stuff from the
> SUn compiler and linker. I planned to enhance smake for OpenSolaris in 2005
> already when Sun did not allow binary redistribution of the Sun make program.

> BTW: smake consumes aprox. 10x less user CPU time than Sun make and is
> noticable faster in case that a target is up to date.

> SchilliX will in future provide a drop in replacement for Sun dmake based on
> smake.

> Jörg


Excellent, I wish you success in this project.

-- 
Thanks,
 Alex