FW: Library infrastructure

[Henrik Nilsson]

Malcolm Wallace wrote:

> I would be interested to know what were the main difficulties you
> perceived with hmake (apart from its current non-support of Hugs).

Well, the non-support for Hugs is an important point. We also wanted
support for mixed-language builds, i.e. parts of a system written in
C/C++ or Java. We wanted support for installation and building of
distributions (source distributions, binary distributions with installation
support, RPMs, ...). We wanted support for building documentation of
various forms.

Our impression was that hmake is an excellent tool for what it does, but
that it just was not intended for doing all we wanted it to do.

That said, maybe a mixed make/hmake build system might have been better than
our current make-only system, except, of course, that hmake then would be
yet another tool the end user would need to install to get going.

> Many pre-processors are also supported by hmake, and it is easy to
> add new ones.

How? By scripting hmake through some kind of hmake file? Or by changing
the source? The latter would not really be quite good enough in my opinion,
since one may want to support non-standard pre-processors for some
particular project. Distributing a tailor-made hmake for that purpose,
and thus potentially forcing the end user to install and manage multiple
hmake-versions at the same time, does not seem very appealing.

Best regards,

/Henrik

-- 
Henrik Nilsson
Yale University
Department of Computer Science
nilsson@cs.yale.edu