Hello,
I am working on a project which has more than 100M lines of code, more than 100K
files and, more than 1000 makefiles. Makefiles apparently have bugs (may build
too little or too much), are slow, messy, and violate "Paul's rules" and common
decency on a routine basis. I am asked to "do something".
Well, seems that because of the size of the problem, fixing existing code is not
an option.
I have an idea - get the full build output from scratch, and write Perl scripts
to process that output into well designed makefiles. It seems it should be
possible to figure out, based on output, what the shell commands are that are
used, what the arguments are, which arguments are options, which are files,
which are generated from other shell commands, and so forth... and figure out
the makefiles from that.
Has anybody heard of this kind of thing being tried on a large project? Is it
hopeless? Do I not see some fundamental obstacle which makes it not possible in
practice? Perhaps somebody already wrote some scripts to do this kind of thing?
Thank you for any advice,