Reason for Make's Popularity vs. Alternatives

What forces are at work keeping crufty old Make (with or without makefile generator tools) prominent as a build tool? Is it deficiencies in alternatives that keep them from being widely adopted, or insufficient publicity, or does something about Make keep it in place?

Despite Make's many weaknesses and difficulties dealing with large projects (e.g. see http://freshmeat.net/articles/what-is-wrong-with-make) it appears to still be more widely used than newer, improved alternatives such as Scons, Jam, Rake, Cook, and others.

Are there measurable benefits to the alternatives, or are the "market shares" due mostly to opinion and experience of team leaders?开发者_如何学运维

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Ubiquity: I like Make because I can trust it will be available where I need it i.e. installed or easily installable on the target machine.

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It's widely available, well documented, concise and powerful + best of all - no XML!.

I've been using it for close to 15 years and still haven't found something better. The coolest thing I've done with it is to have a master makefile generate makefiles for sub projects on-the-fly.

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Regarding your question, which forces are keeping make alive ...its the force of habit.

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• simplicity - easy to do simple things
• ubiquity - some version is on your system
• speed - fast enough for most things
• expressive - pretty good match to the job
• nonobvious complexity - mainly large projects expose problems

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It's availability on a large number of platforms probably helps. If writing a product for multiple platforms, knowing it will always be there is a plus point. It's a pain to have to port your build tool to a new platform before you can build your own project.

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Hm, I never used make as a build system.

Other than that, it's a unique dataflow-programming language, where you can describe set of nodes, each serving specific purpose, describe their behavior, and let the manager handle and control the data flow between them.

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We used scons on a relatively large project to replace make, and found that it was a reasonably flexible system, that allowed us to do some very necessary (but very unfortunate) hacking to get things to build the way we needed them to. Also, make is -strange-.

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i think what would have to occur to see a big shift to another tool, is 1st the tool would have to be created.... that is significantly better. and to affect change, either one of the linux distros or one of the major packages would have to switch to it and probably keep the old one arround for compatibility. i would envision that the new build tool would be capable of generating the legacy makefiles. linux already demonstrated how well he can solve the source code control system with git. i have a pretty good hunch he could come up with something pretty cool and tie in with git.