Comments on: From make to bmake

By: bmake arrives – DragonFly BSD Digest

bmake arrives – DragonFly BSD Digest — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 21:05:23 +0000

[…] Marino’s committed bmake as the replacement to make, as mentioned previously. You should probably do a full buildworld/kernel sequence. This of course only affects you if […]

By: John

John — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:15:35 +0000

Ironically, the “console spew” is the obvious clue that the wrong make was picked. The cause of the spew is basically that our legacy make was frozen while FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD continued to update their make. The spew was caused by unknown modifiers like “:u”. It would have been worse to add “:u” support because then it wouldn’t be obvious the wrong make was invoked.

Replacing system make with bmake won’t solve pkgsrc idiosyncrasies though.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:21:15 +0000

The difference between typing ‘bmake’ and ‘make’ may seem minor, but it’s significant. There’s no obvious clues in the system about which one is the right one to type, when. Most of the pkgsrc documentation out there is for NetBSD, and says only “make”. If you do pick the wrong one, you get a lot of console spew and no helpful error message.

There’s lots of other fiddly details about pkgsrc; pkgsrc works but the amount of steps to take lead to a death by a thousand cuts, where what you want to do and the procedure you have to do to get there seem totally separate. See, for instance, upgrading packages. Lots of choices, none of them totally reliable and simple. The basic method, (b)make replace, doesn’t even work.

By: John

John — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:24:39 +0000

Simon Gerraty, the author of bmake, has given me a diff that should allow one tool to be used in both places.

I’m not sure how life will be much easier with this, other than if you type “make” instead of “bmake” in a pkgsrc directory, the intended action will occur.

We can visit whether or not bmake shouldn’t not be built by default or if we need to bootstrap pkgsrc at all later. those are relatively minor issues.

By: matthiasr

matthiasr — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:00:22 +0000

Could the DragonFly bmake be patched up to just look in both places?

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:18:50 +0000

Aw, poop. I wanted to have it be the same tool use.

By: John

John — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 05:55:53 +0000

pkgsrc will continue to use “bmake”. the system make needs the files in /usr/share/mk while bmake needs the files in /usr/pkg/share/mk.

The only way to converge to a single make would be to import pkgsrc *.mk files into base and I doubt we will do that.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 01:30:36 +0000

OpenBSD uses heavily-modified pmake which is under active development (recently) by Marc Espie (see his slides http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsd2012/espie-dpb/mgp00010.html).