phil@BRL.MIL (Phil Dykstra) (01/14/89)
In X11R2 I was scared of Imakefiles (and would say ``Oh no, an Imakefile!'' or ``Oh boy, a regular Makefile!'') when people posted software. But then in X11R3 I got to love them, largely due to the "ximake" script, which when tailored to the local setup, make Imakefiles completely painless (I have almost never had to edit an Imakefile, but almost always have to edit Makefiles). I applaud MIT's success in nicely packaging such a large system. For people looking for something better though, I would recommend that you consider "Cake" which was put in the public domain in comp.sources.unix a year or so ago. It takes prolog like rules, has a lot of pattern matching ability, also uses CPP, and can execute arbitrary shell commands in Cakefiles. I won't say that it is the end all of such programs, but here at BRL we were able to use it for a large CAD system we distribute (after Make ran out of steam). We have had no problem running Cake on everything from Suns to the Cray Supers (well over a dozen systems). Cake was also sufficiently powerful to solve to NFS shared sources/ different binaries problem (without having to make a shadow source tree). - Phil phil@brl.mil uunet!brl!phil Disclaimer: I didn't write it, and I'm not selling it. I'm just pointing it out.