Yeah. And it's wildly misunderstood too, so you get random people writing and running `make clean test` stuff that inherently disagrees with itself, which can do all kinds of nonsense if your system isn't normal/clean/running on Thursday.
I do still use it for simple automation, because it's nice to have a language-agnostic way to do simple things. But once it grows beyond about a page of text it tends to become a real nightmare, and is nigh impossible for most people to help maintain... which is not at all helped by its absolute lack of clear best-practices or warnings when misconfigured, and poor meshing with many common systems (like source-modifying tools, e.g. gofmt).
It doesn't help that every guide starts out with
# so easy!
thing:
./build thing
When in reality you pretty much always need
at least how this page ends, to be even slightly stable and maintainable:
# The final build step.
$(BUILD_DIR)/$(TARGET_EXEC): $(OBJS)
$(CXX) $(OBJS) -o $@ $(LDFLAGS)
# Build step for C source
$(BUILD_DIR)/%.c.o: %.c
mkdir -p $(dir $@)
$(CC) $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@
# Build step for C++ source
$(BUILD_DIR)/%.cpp.o: %.cpp
mkdir -p $(dir $@)
$(CXX) $(CPPFLAGS) $(CXXFLAGS) -c $< -o $@
It's a horrifying bait-and-switch that a lot of people never fully learn their way through to the end.
I do still use it for simple automation, because it's nice to have a language-agnostic way to do simple things. But once it grows beyond about a page of text it tends to become a real nightmare, and is nigh impossible for most people to help maintain... which is not at all helped by its absolute lack of clear best-practices or warnings when misconfigured, and poor meshing with many common systems (like source-modifying tools, e.g. gofmt).
It doesn't help that every guide starts out with
When in reality you pretty much always need at least how this page ends, to be even slightly stable and maintainable: It's a horrifying bait-and-switch that a lot of people never fully learn their way through to the end.