Hard Build System: Difference between revisions

 

An Easy Build System is responsible for as much as possible, avoiding any user effort. Degrees of this exist, of course. The ultimate easy build system is when the user blindly pipes an URL into an administrative shell:

download-to-stdout http://example.com/myos.sh | sudo sh

 

It'll attempt to do as much work as possible to reliably understand the local operating system. It'll figure out what software needs to be installed, detect the distro and install the correct packages, download and compile source code if needed, might make global changes if needed, and generally try to pick sensible defaults. The script will be very complex because the systems out there are very different. The user can merely hope it works and doesn't screw up the local system too much.

=== External Links ===

* [http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html GNU Make manual] ([http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.pdf PDF] is [https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html freely] available as well)

* [http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf Recursive Make Considered Harmful] — A white paper by Peter Miller on the hazards of using a recursive make build and a suggested alternative

Note: While the purpose of Peter Miller's paper is sound, the dependency configuration outlined in section 5.4 is considered inferior to the dependency configuration outlined in [[Makefile]].