[erlang-questions] Use of makefiles

[James Hague]

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clunky and outdated against the background of the other topics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:

* emakefiles (part of the standard Erlang distribution)
* Write a simple program in Erlang or Perl or Python to build an
application.  Dead simple.  We're talking a dozen lines of code (fewer
lines than in the makefile template).
* Just use an escript that builds your entire application at once.
Seriously.  Most of the time I just keep recompiling the module I'm
working on, and dependencies are such a non-issue in Erlang that I
rarely need to build more.  For those cases simply compiling all the
modules in an application is fine and still relatively speedy.

James