Although make does have a lot of weird quirks, its winning strength is that it is installed virtually everywhere.
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That's true, but it's the same argument that justifies Javascript :)
The thing I don't like about make is the poor debuggability when something goes wrong. I having been using make for 15 years and I'm ready for something that gives me more traceability.
A poster above had it right - it's perfect for mapping input files to output, but inbetween and above that, it stumbles pitifully.
The problem that I've found when I was trying to port my installer to FreeBSD was their make doesn't like GNU Makefiles. Not sure when they diverged from one another so having Make everywhere, doesn't necessary mean your Makefile will work everywhere.
I liked how security centric FreeBSD was but they seem to be anti-enterprise friendly. The process to install Oracle Java was painful and EnterpriseDB didn't even bother creating a Postgres installer for it. Maybe the freedom that the BSD license offers, is making their environment too stagnant when compared to GNU and Linux.
> The problem that I've found when I was trying to port my installer to FreeBSD was their make doesn't like GNU Makefiles. Not sure when they diverged from one another so having Make everywhere, doesn't necessary mean your Makefile will work everywhere.
As with many other utilities, you can always run "gmake" for GNU make. If you can get what you need to do done with portable make, by all means do so, but if you need to depend on GNU make, it's widely available.
A cursory google search should have shown that gmake (GNU Make) is widely available and used on FreeBSD.
Yes it is available and I guess I sort of boxed myself in when I said not available. It's not available as a default install ... at least not on the FreeBSD 10 install disk I used.
FreeBSD tries not to install much third party software with the default install. Everything is available in ports/pkg. The things included in the default install usually BSD licensed/BSD versions. Personally I prefer having third party software disassociated from the core operating system. For me at least, it makes tracking critical updates a lot easier.