Malcolm Wallace wrote:
I would be interested to know what were the main difficulties you perceived with hmake (apart from its current non-support of Hugs).
Well, the non-support for Hugs is an important point. We also wanted support for mixed-language builds, i.e. parts of a system written in C/C++ or Java. We wanted support for installation and building of distributions (source distributions, binary distributions with installation support, RPMs, ...). We wanted support for building documentation of various forms. Our impression was that hmake is an excellent tool for what it does, but that it just was not intended for doing all we wanted it to do. That said, maybe a mixed make/hmake build system might have been better than our current make-only system, except, of course, that hmake then would be yet another tool the end user would need to install to get going.
Many pre-processors are also supported by hmake, and it is easy to add new ones.
How? By scripting hmake through some kind of hmake file? Or by changing the source? The latter would not really be quite good enough in my opinion, since one may want to support non-standard pre-processors for some particular project. Distributing a tailor-made hmake for that purpose, and thus potentially forcing the end user to install and manage multiple hmake-versions at the same time, does not seem very appealing. Best regards, /Henrik -- Henrik Nilsson Yale University Department of Computer Science nilsson@cs.yale.edu