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> But make is widespread, ancient and eternal.

Yeah. The GNU Make is literally everywhere, it's too useful and it's got too many good features. GNU Make is worth learning and using just because of this. Having to deal with non-make systems is seriously annoying.

> It does many jobs relatively well.

I wonder if anyone else other than me was insane enough to try and use GNU Make to manage dotfiles? I even blogged about it.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/managing-dotfiles-wi...

Gotta be really careful with stuff like that. GNU Make is simultaneously a rather lisplike metaprogrammable language and a turing tarpit. I screwed up a personal project once because I got sidetracked essentially reinventing a fraction of autoconf in pure GNU Make code.

Now I try to keep things as simple as possible. I still understand the makefile so I suppose it's simple enough.



> I wonder if anyone else other than me was insane enough to try and use GNU Make to manage dotfiles?

Not a bad idea IMHO… thanks for the blog post. I'm tempted to try something similar.


The real makefile that I use and wrote about has some features that I didn't get around to describing in the blog post. Also has a ton of comments.

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/GNUmake...

The metaprogramming template I described is used to implement XDG Base Directories. The links take the XDG variables into account while the real files live in their default locations inside the repository.




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