You have gone to some trouble with your answer Eduardo, and thanks for that but really you are arguing against a proposition that I have not put and I do not want other readers to be mislead. I am asking about shell scripting of software builds, something that is perfectly possible to do and once must have been the common way. I do not want to see make reimplemented inside bash. Sure, that sounds silly. I think some other contributors have understood my question even without the clarification that has been made. I personally don't mind talking about the related but distinct things that you have raised but I think it would be a wrong to do that in this forum.
On 4 December 2016 at 04:07, Eduardo Bustamante <dual...@gmail.com> wrote: > "build market"? What are you talking about? make was created with the > sole purpose of build automation. The shell was created to provide a > "human interface" to computer operators. These are very specific and > different purposes. Are you going to start asking next to re-implement > vi inside bash? to re-implement a mail user agent? a C compiler? Where > do you draw the line? Read: > http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/creeping-featurism.html > > I doubt anyone is willing to go through the effort to re-implement all > the features that make provides, just because one guy thinks "it's > obsolete" -- it's not, by the way. make is very alive. Also, it is > part of the POSIX international standard. so any operating system that > claims to be compatible with UNIX must provide it, see [1] and [2] and > [3]. > > Also remember that nothing makes a stronger argument than patches. If > you want to see this feature implemented, I suggest that you start > looking into the features make provides, and send patches to add said > functionality to bash. > > [1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/make.html > [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ > [3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-make/ >
