Re: [octave forge] releasing and template Makefiles

[Julien Bect]

Le 14/03/2019 à 16:16, JuanPi a écrit :
> 2. Our developer tools are good but still too mangled. I tried to help
> with the Makefiles, but got demotivated by the constant effort to make
> a complicated Makefiel that covers all possible cases. My suggestion
> is that we split Makefile sin use cases and offer all the templates,
> instread of just one for all

In my opinion, asking each package maintainer to have a "maintainer 
Makefile" at the root of its package was not a good idea in the first 
place, for two reasons :

1) It makes it very difficult to upgrade the Makefiles of all packages 
when the OF admin improve the "template" Makefiles (unless they are 
identical to the template version, but then there is no reason to put 
them in the package).

2) It forces package maintainers to learn about Makefiles (again, unless 
they are satisfied with the template version, but then...).


Again in my opinion : Makefiles are an overly powerful tool for the 
simple administrative tasks that we need to perform with packages (with 
most packages, at least).

I prefer the approach of R which provides simple commands such R CMD 
check, R CMD build, R CMD install, etc. [1].

Similarly in Rust : cargo build, cargo doc, cargo install, etc. [2].


Just my 2 cents...

@++
Julien


[1] 
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#Checking-and-building-packages

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/index.html