Distractions, distractions

[kerravonsen]

(sigh) I have not done one bit of work on my RemixRedux, and I had all these good intentions...

But instead I got distracted into converting my website construction over to makepp rather than the script I was using. Before the script, I'd been using GNU make, but I'd gotten tired of having to write a Makefile for every single directory that had anything in it, and having to put stuff in to recurse down the tree... so I'd written a script inspired by tgen which automatically recurses down a directory tree, using a directory full of xxx2yyy scripts to figure out what can be generated, and tries to generate only particular files (eg .html files). But... that has drawbacks too, especially when one has a site like mine where, while most files can be generated using a default transformation, there are some directories which require calling of completely different scripts (for example the generation of the Net-Fic reviews), so it was all not so simple, and I actually figured that the efforts trying to get around the default action was just as much as having to write makefiles anyway -- especially as I had to call a script to set certain environment variables before I could call my scripts, because I have two sites that I generate; my public site, KatSpace, and my home site, which has things like my CD collection list and all the net-fic that I've saved in a personal archive for re-reading and so on.

So... makepp has some nifty things which solved some of the problems I had with GNU make, and it also has a few "features" which had me tearing my hair out.
Good thing: the wildcard function gives you not only existing matching files, but ones which makepp knows how to generate -- this is a good thing because it means one doesn't have to specify every single file you want to generate, which was one of the reasons I'd given up on GNU make
Bad thing: the wildcard function gives you not only existing matching files, but ones which makepp knows how to generate -- this is a bad thing if you have it in a clean: target and your makefile isn't complete, and it deletes a file which isn't supposed to be generated but there's a default rule for...
Good thing: the include directive keeps on looking upwards in the tree until it finds the file to include. This means that makefiles can be more uniform, another thing that annoyed me about the old make
Bad thing: the _include (optional include) directive keeps on looking upwards in the tree until it find the file to include. This caused me grief a few times because it found the wrong file.
Good thing: a recipe for automatically generating makefiles, with ability for local-to-the-directory variations; though I had to tweak it a bit to get to work the way I wanted it.
Bad thing: it doesn't have the -n option! That means I can't test makefiles, I just have to run them -- too bad if it deletes precious files along the way.
Good thing: one can write sections of perl code to do stuff
Bad thing: one cannot export variables; one has to explicitly set them when doing the commands
Good thing: the precedence for rules is a bit more sane -- if a rule is defined later, it overrides an earlier rule. This makes it easier to have default rules and then customizations which override the default.
It's also a bit stricter at figuring out dependencies, which meant that some of my old make rules had to be rewritten, because files were being altered by rules other than those which generated the files, so the make kept on re-generating the files after they'd been altered.

The other thing I got distracted by was reading "Pandora's Legions" by Christopher Anvil, one of the books at the Baen Free Library. I was expecting it to be a bit jingoistic, as it was one of these "humans are superior" novels, but instead it was amusing, in a comedy-of-errors sort of way. The "Hunter" sections of it (which I liked best) reminded me of "The Unorthodox Engineers" (I think by Colin Kapp -- I borrowed it from the library as a teen and have never seen it since and miss it greatly). These guys, rather than being unorthodox engineers faced with impossible engineering problems, are unorthodox military faced with impossible military problems. But I think there were like only three incidents there; the rest was following another character with big-picture problems.

Comments

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Ooh, if it reminds you of the Unorthodox Engineers, I must read it. I loved those stories when I was a teenager too, usually encountering them in those old yellow Gollancz anthologies at the library I think. I'd love to read them again.

[kerravonsen]

I just checked out Amazon, and Amazon UK, and ABEBooks, and the cheapest price for "The Unorthodox Engineers" was US $95! No way I'd pay that kind of money for a book, no matter how fond I was of it. I wish they'd republish it.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Ouch!!!