Re: GNU make 4.00 & remake

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2013-10-01 at 18:29 +0200, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
> The remake utility http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/ is very useful
> to debug complex makefiles. (e.g. by running remake -x, ....)
> 
> Next GNU make 4.0 (to be released very soon) will have marvelous
> features (Guile scriptability, etc...)
> 
> Is there any ambition to merge remake debugging facilities into some GNU
> make 4.x release?

I believe there was some talk about it a number of years ago.  I hope
I'm not making this up but as I recall it Rocky felt it would be easier
to maintain and develop remake separately.

It might be possible to leverage some of the new features, either now or
in the future, to allow remake to be less of a fork and more of an
add-on.  For example the interfaces to Guile and loadable plugins is
very trivial right now but if it were enhanced perhaps remake, or at
least parts of it, could be turned into a loadable object (or rewritten
in Guile ;-)).  I've not really looked at or played with remake enough
to understand what would be necessary or how feasible that is.

I'm interested in having that conversation in any event.