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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > Future Releases: moving bsdmake to make and [gnu]make to gmake

Future Releases: moving bsdmake to make and [gnu]make to gmake
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gorgonzola
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Aug 22, 2002, 11:06 AM
 
There's an argument that just started on the darwin-development list that some people here would be interested in (I'd imagine). I'll just repost the first post, from Jordan Hubbard, to make explaining easier (email addresses removed to prevent spam harvesting...):

Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 22:48:06 -0700
Subject: Any objection to the idea of switching to bsdmake as the
default make?
Cc: darwin-development
To: unix-porting
From: Jordan Hubbard

Hey folks,

It's causing a lot of confusion out there in the world where we talk
about how BSD-based we are and are more than happy to cite FreeBSD as
our reference platform, yet for some inexplicable reason (and I blame
Fred for it) we chose to run totally cross-grain with the BSD community
in making our /usr/bin/make be GNU make of all things, a make(1) which
has a completely different syntax and, sadly, is not anywhere close to
compatible with BSD make or the point wouldn't even be worth debating.

I think it would simply obey the principle of least astonishment to
have a single overriding rule when it comes to our toolchain and system
binaries, which is that wherever a BSD version of a tool exists we
should use it in preference to a GNU tool and not out of any religious
reasons concerning which tool is "better" - in most respects they're
generally pretty comparable and there's no reason to get religious
about that. The principle concern is to provide a uniform toolset and
not a dog's breakfast mixture of GNU tools and BSD tools with no
apparent rhyme or reason as to why tool X was chosen from GNU and tool
Y was chosen from BSD. In the case where there's no available tool
under the BSD license then sure, just as we do with gcc, we fall back
to GNU but we have at least sought to minimize the confusion which
results from more gratuitous divergence.

And yes, I'm well aware of the fact that we ship BSD make as "bsdmake"
(making us probably the only Unix system to call it that, too) but that
doesn't help the BSD user who's just copied over a large BSD source
tree and typed "make" only to see it fall over immediately, kicking its
legs. This is an inconsistency, plain and simple, and enough GNU
configuration scripts are used to relying explicitly on "gmake" that I
think we can make the transition without breaking the GNU make
dependent stuff too. BSD make has been around for a lot longer than
GNU make and it's generally accepted by the GNU community that they're
more likely to have their make living alongside BSD make than the other
way around.

--
Jordan K. Hubbard
Engineering Manager, BSD technology group
Apple Computer
So far, the most vocal opponents of this are the Fink guys, as switching their 1100 Makefiles to gmake instead of make would require a fair bit of work (especially given that they've had to redo a lot of packages for 10.2 already).

Anyway, if you use Darwin much, it's probably something you want to read. You can follow it in the Apple Mailing List Archives at lists.apple.com. Just thought some people might be interested. If you have something relevant and intelligent to say, of course, I'm sure they'd appreciate you taking the time to subscribe to the list and post something about it.
"Do not be too positive about things. You may be in error." (C. F. Lawlor, The Mixicologist)
     
   
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