Re: Build systems suck. Can Lua be the basis for a better build system?

[Enrico Tassi <gares@...>]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 11:49:42AM +0000, David Given wrote:
> GNU make does provide some built-in features to make this sort of thing
> a little less painful, such as target-specific variables, but they've
> got weird edge conditions that make them less useful than you might think.

Indeed I had that in mind.  Why are these not sufficient?

> makefiles tend to balloon into unmaintainable tangles. The best example
> of a modular Make build system I've seen is the one used by the Android
> platform build system and NDK. It uses include files rather than macros,
> and a user-specific file looks like this:

Hum, it seems it is just a collection of different makefiles, that read
a common config file containing the list of source files plus some extra
metadata (I read the inclusion the other way around).

What makes this unreadable (apart from Make syntax that is not exactly
intuitive)?

Cheers
-- 
Enrico Tassi