[Asdf-devel] Minor minimakefile nit

[Robert Goldman]

Robert P. Goldman wrote:
> The minimakefile help lists:
> 
> archive                      alias for command make-and-publish-archive
> 
> but make-and-publish-archive is not listed as a command in the help, nor
> in the makefile. Is this description out of date?
> 
> Question: can we do a long help for individual commands, like
> 
> make help archive?
> 
> As an aside, I would say that if one is interested in making CL a
> serious scripting contender, some equivalent of perl's Getopt::Long
> library for command line parsing (perhaps Didier's Clon would fit the
> bill?), and pod inline documentation is going to be critical.
> 
> I pushed a comment on the makefile to explain at the top how to get help.

The flipside to my earlier argument about putting back the test
scripting using bash and make alone is

"given the asdf builder scripts, what function does the makefile serve now?"

What assistance is offered by having someone use

make archive

instead of simply

asdf-builder archive ?

What benefit does the make shim provide?  I suppose it chains together
dependencies, but given that the makefile shows hardly any use of the
filesystem to track the need (or lack thereof) of building, make seems
to me like just a barrier to the user's understanding of the function.

For make test and for the file concatenation, make provides the ability
to do the core operations with no additional machinery.  So those seem
good. But for the other functions, it just seems like make is adding a
cumbersome layer of indirection.

Cheers,
r





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Robert P. Goldman
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