[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Coadjute 0.0.1, generic build tool

[Nicolas Pouillard]

Excerpts from Matti Niemenmaa's message of Sun Jan 18 19:47:46 +0100 2009:
> Henning Thielemann wrote:
> > Matti Niemenmaa schrieb:
> >> Announcing the release of Coadjute, version 0.0.1!
> >>
> >> Web site: http://iki.fi/matti.niemenmaa/coadjute/
> >> Hackage:
> >> http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Coadjute
> <snip>
> > How does it compare to
> >    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hake
> 
> Short answer: the question that comes to mind is "how does hake compare 
> to make?" Coadjute seems to be more capable, in general, but then I 
> don't know pretty much anything about hake.
> 
> Somewhat longer answer:
> 
> Coadjute is better in that:
>    1. hake's documentation is rather sparse. I have no idea what most
>       functions do, or even what exactly the main program does.
>    2. hake doesn't seem to do parallel builds, but I'm not sure because
>       of point 1.
>    3. Coadjute keeps track of command line arguments (see docs for
>       details): for me this is really a killer feature, I don't know of
>       anything else which does this.

ocamlbuild does this.

>    4. hake always uses timestamps, Coadjute can use MD5 hashes as well.
>    5. Coadjute can have arbitrary path specifications, hake's rules seem
>       to be based on file extensions only, thus applying only to the
>       current directory. Peter Miller's "Recursive Make Considered
>       Harmful" comes to mind: http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/

[...]

Moreover, it seems that Coadjute and ocamlbuild share a fair number of design
choices, maybe having a look at it could be fruitful.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard