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jgc's rules for asking questions (was Re: too simple of a problem)


From: John Graham-Cumming
Subject: jgc's rules for asking questions (was Re: too simple of a problem)
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:52:36 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040208 Thunderbird/0.5 Mnenhy/0.6.0.104

Paul D. Smith wrote:
Also, I would strongly urge you to lay off the eval stuff unless it's
REALLY necessary.  People wrote lots of very complex makefiles for many,
many years without eval.  Eval is very powerful but it gives a lot of
added complexity to a makefile and causes it to be very difficult to
read (plus it takes more computing power to parse your makefiles).

Can I just add a 'hear, hear', here?

One of the things I don't like about the "Managing Projects with GNU Make" book is that the author _loves_ $(eval) and uses it all the time.

$(eval) is really cool, but it's also mostly unnecessary. And if you use $(eval) you've excluded anyone who uses GNU Make 3.79.1 or below (and there are lots of them out there).

While I'm talking generalities... lately this list has had a lot of questions that involve people not explaining themselves clearly or just dumping a massive Makefile and asking "Why doesn't this work?".

If I might be so bold as to complement Paul Rules for Makefiles with jgc's rules for asking questions:

1. Describe clearly the desired outcome
2. Describe clearly the effect you are observing
3. Make sure that #1 != #2
4. Provide the smallest possible example that illustrates the divergence between #1 and #2.

John.
--
John Graham-Cumming
address@hidden

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