Problem in Genode building system?

[Frank Kaiser]

Hello, Norman

I didn't intend to specifically blame Genode for using MAKE. It is still widely used by the Open Souce community within big project (the Linux kernel, Android, ...). People have invested a lot of time in the build systems, and are therefore somewhat lazy to switch to another one despite existing drawbacks. And its popularity does not drive people looking for alternatives
MAKE is by no means a set-and-forget system. Its complexity has grown over the years, and there is a lot of magic in it to solve certain tasks. All this makes it difficult to comprehend what it can and cannot do. Maintenance of a big MAKE system can be a nightmare when you have to refactore a big project, where the original creators did spend much time about thinking how it may evolve.

Frank
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Norman Feske [mailto:norman.feske at ...1...]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 4:39 PM
> To: genode-main at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: Problem in Genode building system?
> 
> Hi Frank,
> 
> cool to see a life sign of you!
> 
> > Youre example is one of several reasons for which I do not understand
> > that people keep staying with MAKE, although other build tools exist
> > (for instance SCONS) which do not produce this kind of failures.
> 
> the choice of basing our build system on make rather than SCons was
> actually an informed decision. At an early stage of the project, our
> build system was ported to SCons by Ludwig Hähne. You can read about his
> findings here:
> 
>   http://www.genode-labs.com/publications/scons-vs-make-2008.pdf
> 
> In short, his thesis motivated us to reconsider the build system's
> architecture (based on recursive make) we used back then in favor of our
> current two-stage build concept. But we stayed with using make as
> underlying dependency-resolution mechanism.
> 
> Cheers
> Norman