Re: Idea: GNU Make Standard Library

[Dill, John]

> I took a look at this and it's very cool!  Some really nice things in
> here.  Kudos!

I agree.  It's a nice start.  I only wish I had more time at this point to 
contribute :(

I'll get some commentary going on gmsl, but perhaps it should go to a different 
mailing list?

>From an implementation standpoint, is the desire of gmsl to stay out of the 
>$(shell ...) environment for all/most/some of its implementation?  For 
>example, my trace mechanism does not use warning because I really don't want 
>makefile to spit that information out.  I use shell and echo and redirect to 
>the stderr.  Since there appears to be no make function to echo information 
>without adding information to it, I've gone with doing it this way, although 
>I'd prefer making a patch to gmake ;).

There are some other things which I use sed as a text formatter for some of my 
functions.  Could there be a supported list of shell functions that would be 
needed to implement some of gmsl's functionality?  I currently use echo, sed, 
rm, and test, although I try to limit it to that, and also try to keep as much 
functionality in make as possible as ther is a performance penalty.

Also, it will probably happen at some point that the maintenance of gmsl will 
become burdensome if all the implementation is in a single file.  Eventually, I 
think there will come a point where the implementation needs to be split into 
several files.  It does have the advantage that there aren't many function 
dependency issues though.

Lastly, a note on syntax.  gmake has functions which use '-' instead of '_' to 
separate words in functions (i.e. filter-out), so should this continue in that 
tradition?  My functions currently use '_' as well, but I think maintaining 
some uniformity with gmake's syntax is something to consider.

Best,
John