GNU Make Room for Improvement

it_user790464 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

Vanilla GNU Make does not support any kind of colored output. A wrapper named colormake exists to work around this, but native (opt-in) support would be welcome.

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it_user1065 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of Data Center at a integrator with 51-200 employees
Few cons of GNU make 1) Problems in fulfilling dependency with different kernel versions 2) Poor reliability for larger or incremental builds 3) Differentiates between two files on basis of time stamps and not the contents of the files 4) Environment variable inheritance and dependencies View full review »
it_user790461 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Tabs. GNU Make requires using the Tab symbol as the first symbol of command line for execution. In some text editors this can be problematic, as they automatically insert spaces instead of tabs.

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it_user1227 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees
GNU make has just the basic build automation features and is not smart enough to handle complex build issues e.g. it cannot handle circular dependency in the makefiles and requires you to manually fix them. Also it cannot generate builds targeted for different platform and requires the end user to use some other third party tool for the same. GNU make is a bad candidate for builds that require incremental builds often, as it does not support this feature. Due to all these features it is recommended for small to medium projects only and is not suitable for very complex and heavy projects which requires various circular dependency etc. View full review »
it_user1158 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
- Since builds targeted for a particular platform cannot be run on a different platform, "Make" doesn't have the inbuilt functionality of tailoring a build targeted to a platform. It relies on other tools like AutoConf for platform based build customizations. - Recursive make might result in circular dependency. - Make parsers don't follow the standard model, as parsing a makefile without reading it is not possible. - Writing makefiles is not easy as it requires a basic knowledge of make syntax. - One major weakness of the make is its limited support for “if” conditionals. Writing make commands involving AND, OR, etc. is very cumbersome. - Make has no data types, other than strings. There is no Boolean type. - Make’s reliability is very poor and is not suitable for larger or incremental builds. - Not being able to list any dependency to make will lead to a compilation failure. Each and every dependency has to be declared explicitly. - Editing target files during build has an unpredictable impact on the build. - Due to buggy makefiles containing circular dependency, target files get rebuilt even though none of its targets have changed since the last build. View full review »
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