[erlang-questions] Use of makefiles

[Chandru]

On 28/02/2008, James Hague <james.hague@REDACTED> wrote:
> As much as I like Joe's book, the use of makefiles jumped at at me as
>  clunky and outdated against the background of the other topics
>  discussed in it.  There are simpler options:
>

I don't agree that Makefiles are outdated. Clunky? Probably.

Peter Mander (my colleague) has implemented a build system using
Makefiles which is brilliant. It builds and packages a whole release
for our system in about 30 seconds using parallel make (-j option) on
an 8 core machine. Some of our systems are comprised about 7 different
type of nodes and during develop-test-release cycles, we have to churn
out new builds quite a few times. It has already saved us a *lot* of
time and effort.

I personally am not very familiar with the Makefile syntax but I don't
think it would've been easy to achieve the same results, in quite the
same time, by rolling our own version of make.

cheers
Chandru