{"id":433,"date":"2009-02-13T15:57:49","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T19:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/?p=433"},"modified":"2009-02-13T16:29:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-13T20:29:00","slug":"pymake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2009-02-13\/pymake\/","title":{"rendered":"pymake: A Mostly GNU-compatible `make`, Written in Python"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mozilla has a lot of Makefiles, and although we’re not completely happy with our current recursive-make build system, converting to something else is a very difficult task<\/a>. In order to consider other solutions, we have to have a seamless migration path from our existing infrastructure. Unfortunately for any potential migration, Mozilla uses pretty much every make feature and quirk imaginable. It isn’t sufficient to get by with some simplistic importer: any migration needs to understand the arcane details of makefile syntax and parsing rules.<\/p>\n

So finally, after two years of considering whether it’s feasible and a good idea, I bit the bullet and wrote a make replacement in python. It was almost as mind-numbingly difficult as I thought it would be. But after two solid weeks, I have a tool which will mostly build Mozilla, and seems to be doing it correctly.<\/p>\n

Why would you do such a thing?<\/h3>\n

Mark Pilgrim<\/a> was right: only a crazy person says “I’m going to build my own build system”. So rather than creating a whole new build system with a new syntax, I wanted to start out replicating an existing build system exactly. Then we can make incremental changes if appropriate.<\/p>\n

What kind of incremental changes?<\/h3>\n

First up are speed increases. Our Windows builds are currently very slow, in part due to the large number of processes that are spawned. There are several ways to attack this:<\/p>\n