[fpc-devel] The future of fpmake

[Jonas Maebe]

On 31 Mar 2011, at 13:29, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> 1. they are mostly generated anyway. The .fpc files are the info,  
> not the
>   makefiles themselves.

I still prefer those Makefile.fpc files very much to the fpmake.pp  
files. The fact that fpmake.pp files are plain Pascal code makes them  
extremely flexible, but at the same time that also makes it much  
harder to quickly get an overview of what they do. Sticking to the  
Makefile.fpc format (or any other structured format) and then  
automatically generating something else from that (be it plain  
Makefiles, fpmake.pp or whatever) would make it much easier to  
maintain the actual build instructions, I think. It would also make it  
less likely that over time some fpmake.pp will become harder and  
harder to read.


Jonas

PS: I assume that currently there already is a way to auto-generate  
fpmake files like this: http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/trunk/packages/univint/fpmake.pp 
  (or did you manually derive all those dependencies, or use a quickly  
hacked together script to parse the uses-clauses of those particular  
units?)